Director's Works

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USAF, Airman Julia Kupiec
Unsigned

WEBSITE @juliakupiec @yachtclubfilms

Julia is a Brooklyn based director of narrative and commercial work. The daughter
of an architect and lighting designer, Julia grew up being carried around
construction sites in a 5-gallon bucket. She ate her morning cereal with burly
contractors, wiry electricians and frazzled, sleep-deprived parents who could
never figure out where they put the drawings. It’s likely she was always destined
to have too many opinions and a compulsion to critique every built environment
she walks into even though absolutely nobody asked. When Julia decided she
wanted to be a director, she thought she was rebelling against the family trade
until she realized that films are a lot like buildings. They’re almost impossible to
make, they take a huge amount of people and skill sets to put together, and to
stand tall on their own, they require a vision that’s able to carry them through
complications and setbacks, taking each curve ball and turning it into something
that adds to the structural integrity, instead of wears it down. Julia doesn't
remember a lot of the finished buildings from her youth but what she does
remember is the ever-present movement towards them. For better or worse, that
process of creation is the same barometer by which she’s come to measure her
own life. Her mood is entirely dependent on the status of her next project and all of
her friends are forced to cope with this hazardous fact. At 27, Julia has directed
commercial work for clients such as Columbia Records, the US Air Force, UMass,
and more. Last year she was shortlisted for the Young Director Award at Cannes
and earned 8 nominations across three projects at the Berlin Commercial Film
Festival. She’s developing her first feature documentary and is in pre production
for a narrative short set to shoot later this year.

This project was intended to be a historical look at the role women have played in the US Air Force. All VO is sourced from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.