Born in 1990, Julia graduated from the Lausanne University of Art and Design in 2014. Her graduation film JOUR J, has been screened at numerous international festivals, including the Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival. She then directed FIANCEES, a feature documentary about the marriage process in Egypt. The film premiered at Visions du Réel Festival in 2019 and won awards at the Tirana, Mumbai and Palermo festivals. In 2023 she co-directed with Benjamin Bucher the feature documentary FULL TANK, which premiered at Vision du Réel. Julia also teaches in the cinema department of the Lausanne University of Art and Design and in the Master HEAD/ECAL.
PROJECT
Gothon
In 1870, in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, the devout seamstress Marguerite Bays is dying of intestinal cancer. Longing to be reunited with Christ, she welcomes death, but after a vision of the Crucifixion she miraculously recovers bearing the stigmata. Examined by doctors and clergy, she is proclaimed a living saint and becomes an object of popular devotion. As her growing fame frees her from her domineering brother, it also draws her into the orbit of Chanoine Schorderet, an influential priest whose ambitious plans she endorses in the name of faith. When she discovers she has been manipulated to legitimize a project that betrays the workers, including her own brother, her spiritual certainty collapses. Abandoned by those she loves and stripped of her illusions, Marguerite is left to confront the painful gap between holiness and human frailty.
