Julien Hayet-Kerknawi

Julien Hayet-Kerknawi is a Belgian writer, director, and producer whose work pairs spectacle filmmaking with the emotional sincerity of the European auteur tradition. He grew up fascinated by large-canvas cinema and started directing in his twenties; his short A Broken Man (2015) — a WWI-set story shot in his native Belgium — screened at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and won at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.

Over the eight years that followed, he expanded that short into his feature directorial debut, The Last Front (2024). The film follows Leonard, a widower farmer pulled into the chaos of the First World War, and stars Iain Glen. It avoids the conventional WWI iconography of trenches, tanks and planes in favour of medieval-style combat staged across protected heritage locations in the Flemish countryside. Shot in just thirty days with deliberately minimal coverage, the picture had its world premiere at Kinepolis Ghent on 1 February 2024 and rolled out theatrically in the United States on 9 August 2024.

In June 2024, Hayet-Kerknawi co-founded Enigma Releasing with his sister, producer Virginie Hayet. The company was launched to bring high-quality European independent films to U.S. theatres — and American films back into Belgian cinemas — at a target cadence of four to five releases per year. The Last Front was its first theatrical release.

Beyond directing, Hayet-Kerknawi works as a screenwriter, editor, producer and cinematographer. His earlier independent thriller Stolepark (2013) credits him in all five capacities. He continues to develop original screenplays and to shepherd theatrical releases through Enigma Releasing from its base in Belgium.