Julien Elie made his film debut with a short fiction film, Jusquiame noire, which stills remains unfinished. After spending time in Rwanda in 1997 with Croatian priest Vjeko Curic, who was murdered a few months later, he directed Celui Qui Savait , an investigative film about political crimes in the region. At the end of the 90s, he entered into a correspondence with death row inmate Farley C. Matchett, and in 2002 directed The Last Meal, a plunge into the heart of Huntsville, Texas, capital of the death penalty in the United States. In his early thirties, he gets lost in a blizzard. He emerges several years later, ending up somewhere in Mexico. He then ventures in search of an abandoned hotel in the mountains of Michoacán, where Luis Buñuel used to write his screenplays. Perhaps it was from the top of these cliffs from which emerged the framework of Dark Suns.