Feminist figure and renowned writer, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this Thursday, October 6.
The one who has never stopped telling herself through her books, has deployed her story in a new form, unveiled in May at the Cannes Film Festival.
The 82-year-old author has indeed made a film with her son David Ernaux-Briot entitled
The Super 8 Years.
Expected in theaters on December 16, this first feature film is made from family films made between 1972 and 1981, and shows the fragments of a life that the writer comments on in voiceover.
Evoking her mother, her children, her couple, the documentary also tells of the desire to write which tormented her then.
Also emerging, through trips to Russia, Albania or Chile, the portrait of a social class left in a changing world.
Either "snippets of a family life taken invisibly in the history of the time".
“Reviewing our super eight films taken between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that these were not only a family archive but also a testimony to the tastes, hobbies, lifestyle and aspirations of a class social, during the decade following 1968. These mute images, I wanted to integrate them into a story at the crossroads of history, the social and also the intimate, using my personal diary of these years there”, explains Annie Ernaux in her notes of intent.
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His courage
In Stockholm this Thursday, October 6, the French author was hailed for “the courage and the clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”.
Since the 1970s, the former literature professor has produced numerous autobiographical works, drawing inspiration from the world around her through her personal experience.
In 2021, she saw her own story being adapted to the cinema in the film
L'Événement
directed by Audrey Diwan, inspired by her eponymous novel, retracing the clandestine abortion of Annie Ernaux.
The feature film won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice Film Festival.
The Super 8 Years
, by Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot, theatrically released on December 14, and available until October 31 on arte.tv