Julio Medem Lafont was born in San Sebastian on October 21, 1958. In his blood they are mixed up to four origins. On the part of his paternal grandparents Germany and Valencia, on the part of the mother ones the Basque Country and France.
   After spending part of his infancy in his natal city his family moved to Madrid after the birth of his brother Alberto. There he studied in El Colegio del Pilar, where he received an elitist education in the bosom of a bourgeois and well-off environment.
   His interest for the cinema was born to the side of the camera of Super 8 mm with which his father was rolling the life of the family. In the nights, clandestinly, Julio was taking the camera to experiment with the magic of the light and the images together with his sister Ana. Little by little and by means of the assembly of these stills the future director began to discover the powerful fascination that is to handle the space and the time, the attraction that is create a fiction of nothing with a modest camera of super 8 and a little moviola.
   During the adolescence he suffered an episode of dislike that would mark his personality: lover of a neighbor silently lived enough time tormented by not through correspondence of his feelings. Even he managed to write an oneiric, qualified novel My first day, marked by this experience. The girl in question ended up by being a girlfriend of one of his brothers. Since curiosity it is necessary to aim that she appears in one of his shorts films in Super 8, Fideos (1979).

   After this situation he begins to invert great par of his time in the sports, specially in the athletics where it managed to be the whole promise and was on the verge of being selected for the Olimpic Games. At the age of eighteen he was to Soria determined to turn into psychiatrist, focusing clearly his(her,your) life towards one of his obsessions: the study of the dark corners of the mind humanizes. Finally he graduated in Medicine and Surgery for the UPV.
   Installed again in San Sebastian he began to enter the cinematographic professional world across the critique La Voz de Euskadi. While, he continued rolling shorts, continuing with his learning self-taught and writing scripts of which he was dreaming some day to turn in full-lenght films.

    One day he travelled even to Madrid with a script under the qualified arm Cows. In all the producers to whom it came they pushed back that history of strange argument and not less curious title. Medem, very disappointed, returned to San Sebastian and began to write another history less complex and nearer to the postulates of the industry. In these moments in which the script of The red squirrel began to grow among Julio's hands it was when he received a call of the producting newborn child Sogetel to accept the project of Cows (1992).
   After the accomplishment of his first movie, with which he obtained a great repercussion for the original of his offer, Medem began to construct across his movies the most interesting movie universe of the Spanish cinema and one of most emphasized from the European cinema indicated as one of the inheritors of looks as personal as those of the Spanish Luis Buñuel, Iván Zulueta or Víctor Erice, or of European filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovski or Krzysztof Kieslowski.

    After his second full-lenght film, The red squirrel (1993), his life could change completely in the professional area. Recommended by the mismísimo Stanley Kubrick (to whom he filled with enthusiasm the movie led by Emma Suárez y Nancho Novo), Steven Spielberg called to Julio with the offer to direct The mask of the Zorro, a film based on the mythical personage that there was going to fulfil his producer, Dreamworks. After reading the script and thinking what it would provoke to sell at Hollywood realizing a movie of adventures with a cinematographic very distant concept to his one, Medem scorned the offer and prefered to continue with his movie projects in Spain. The movie was directed finally in 1998 by Martin Campbell and led by Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins.

    The following one was Earth (1996), probably the movie which pre-production brought more of head to Medem, since the filming had to postpone several times in he waits for Antonio Banderas, who had commitments to roll in USA. Julio, tired, he ended up by forgetting to Banderas and chose for Carmelo Gómez to interpret to Angel.
    In 1997 there created Alicia Produce S.L., his own cinematographic producer, with whom he has realized some of his works.
    In 1998, with Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Julio the recognition of the public came to him and was consolidated as one of the big values of the national cinematography. This movie caused a great trauma in spite of his good commercial yield, since the tragic end of this history of love was chasing him constant in his thoughts. So he chose to give another opportunity to the personage of Ana reincarnating her in Lucía, the protagonist of his fifth movie, Sex and Lucia (2001), a movie that he speaks about the random, the chances of the destiny and of food that provide to our existence the love and the sex.

    On September 21, 2003, inside the Section of Special Zabaltegui of the International Festival of Cinema of San Sebastian, Julio released The Basque Ball. Skin against Stone, a documentary on the political and social existing problematics in Basque Country. This work generated a great polemic from which the director defended himself shielding itself in the clean and honest look with which this movie was realized. After The Basque ball Julio was going to form in his sixth full-lenght film of fiction the history of Aitor. Skin against Stone, movie relates of the documentary, but that definitively parked to be thrown towards other movie and narrative courses by Chaotic Ana.