The French Nobel prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, known for her fearless and taboo-breaking writing, takes on the documentary as both director and subject.
Considered one of France’s most significant writers, Annie Ernaux is a Nobel Laureate and internationally acclaimed for her courageous autobiographical literature that traverses her personal experience with wider French society. Her most notable book, A Man’s Place, is a study of her relationship with her father growing up in rural France and her subsequent shift into adulthood, intersecting gender and class issues. The honesty in her autobiographical writing liberated taboo feminine experiences like abortion, sexuality, family, ageing and illness. Made from Ernaux’s home movies, The Super 8 Years is an extension of her literary ambitions, and the new documentary by Claire Simon, Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, surveys the legacy of Ernaux’s writing on young readers today.
The Super 8 Years / dir. Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot / 2022
Hidden in these nostalgic home movies, shot between 1972 and 1981, is a story of a strained marriage under the pressure of Ernaux pursuing a literary career whilst raising a young family. The film is a testament to the lifestyle and pastimes of everyday domestic family life, which is both personal and universal. The footage is a collection of classic scenes of birthdays, Christmas, and holidays, captured mostly by her ex-husband, the family’s “head-filmmaker”, whose absence from the frame contributes to the increasingly fractured feeling of family life and to Ernaux’s subtle silencing.
The documentary also offers a time capsule of the 1970s social outlook, suggesting that the Ernaux family’s experience is symptomatic of the French cultural shift towards women and family. Ernaux’s narration interrupts the images with reflections on heartache and pain beneath the seemingly idyllic imagery. The film’s power comes from this tension between recorded and personal memory, offering a multiplicity of perspectives on these bittersweet years. Released in 2022, the same year as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, the potency of home videos similarly gestures to the conflation of objective and subjective memory.
Don’t miss a rare chance to catch an Annie Ernaux Double Bill when The Super 8 Years screens at Bertha DocHouse on May 16th. Book tickets here.
Writing Life: Annie Ernaux through the Eyes of High School Students / dir. Claire Simon / 2025
In this observational documentary, Claire Simon visits schools in France and French Guiana, recording how students respond to the memoirs and literature of Annie Ernaux. Despite the generational gap, the film shows that young people still identify with her work and its feminist values. The themes of Ernaux’s writing provoke conversations about the body and sexuality, as well as the students’ social and class trajectories, as they reflect on their parental relationships and home lives.
The discussion of Ernaux fosters maturity and enables teenagers to engage critically with social and patriarchal boundaries. Simon, who has often turned to the institution of school in documentaries such as Elementary (2024) and The Graduation (2016), as well as to the topic of restrictions on women’s bodies, is the perfect fit for this emotionally honest film that illustrates the endurance of Ernaux’s words.
Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students screens at Bertha DocHouse from May 16th. Book tickets here.