Nine Songs: Julia Jackman

A beautifully executed queer fable, it punches high and tight thematically and lands a denouement that feels more profound than ever in 2026. Throw in a trio of brilliant performances from three of the decade's most exciting stars and a beautifully understated - and carefully deployed - Charli XCX appearance, and you have a piece of cinema that's filled with playfulness and poignancy.

"Music is really important to me and always has been," Jackman tells me as we dive into her earliest memories of song a few weeks before Christmas. Hailing from Edmonton – an industrial city and capital of Alberta – she grew up amid a golden age for the area's music scene, with Mac DeMarco, Purity Ring, Cadence Weapon already beginning to make waves. "I think maybe there wasn't much to do there and I went to so many gigs. I was a very teetotal teenager and that's how I met my friend Rollie [Roland "Rollie" Pemberton aka rapper Cadence Weapon] – we were both drinking water at the bar.

"The bands were all a few years older than me but I worked in one of the last surviving video rental stores there, and a lot of the musicians worked in there too."

Jackman's debut, the Josh O'Connor queer romcom Bonus Track, was a film inextricably tied to its soundtrack, but the London-based director isn't someone who necessarily has a grand vision for how music should be deployed in her films.

"I hold it quite lightly, because you never really know what you're going to be allowed to do or not," she explains. "In Bonus Track – which was brought to me by the producers, actor Josh O'Connor and writer Mike Gilbert – the entire thing was was structured through key songs in the main character's life, which is kind of funny considering this interview. Because it was set in 2006 – such a nostalgic kind of time – some songs you can get and some songs you can't. It was about music that signposted time, without being a cliché."

In 100 Nights of Hero, there's just one carefully placed needle drop – a closing song by Purity Ring, one of the bands she grew up around, commissioned specially for the film. "I just had their sound in my head," she tells me. "This quite ethereal, but modern sound."

The Edmonton duo do make it into Jackman's Nine Songs, among eight others chosen largely for the moments of freedom, joy and celebration that have accompanied Jackman's creative and personal journey. "I do have some sad songs that I didn't include in this list," she explains, "songs that I can't listen to anymore because they're associated with death or breakups, but I decided to try and keep it happy."