29/08/2025 - VENICE 2025: Claire Simon uses the novelist's writings as a mirror to sketch a portrait that is both simple and subtle of the diversity of contemporary French youth

"Things happened to me so that I could write about them." Annie Ernaux's writings are a prolific source of inspiration for cinema (the fiction films Happening [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Anamaria Vartolomei
film profile], Simple Passion [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Danielle Arbid
film profile] and The Other One [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], the documentaries J’ai aimé vivre là [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and The Super-8 Years [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Annie Ernaux and David Erna…
film profile]), and now it is the turn of a leading voice in documentary filmmaking, Claire Simon, to take on the work of the 2022 Nobel Prize winner for literature and showcase its universality in Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, unveiled in a special screening at the Giornate degli Autori at the 82nd Venice Film Festival. A reflective film that pays a beautiful tribute to the novelist's striking singularity, but which is above all part of the director's long-term work exploring and representing French youth (Elementary [+see also:
film review
film profile], Young Solitude [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Claire Simon
film profile], The Graduation [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]).

The programme is very simple: in eight secondary schools across France (Paris, the working-class Parisian suburbs including Sarcelles, three different provincial locations including Toulouse, Villefranche-sur-Saône and Saint-Christol-lez-Alès, and overseas with Cayenne), students read excerpts from Annie Ernaux's books and discuss them, first in class and then outside of class. A mosaic of exchanges and new insights that perfectly illustrate the profound meaning of the literary source: “writing about life, the same for everyone, but experienced individually, a subject to explore, a sensitive truth”.

Social classes, communication difficulties within families, place in society, love, sexuality and the issue of consent, motherhood, patriarchy, language, etc.: each reading sparks a flood of comments, debates and anecdotes from young people who relate the topics addressed very directly and without filter by Annie Ernaux to their own experiences. The result is a fascinating composite picture of a diverse generation (particularly those from immigrant backgrounds) still caught up in the relative naivety of their age, yet often displaying great maturity in many areas.

"Don't bite off more than you can chew." By choosing this quote for her first sequence, Claire Simon immediately sets a modest tone for a charming film focused on "essential truths." But make no mistake: the filmmaker has a masterful grasp of subtext and very subtly orchestrates ("no detail is left to chance") the refreshing spontaneity of the testimonies in her editing. Like Annie Ernaux's writing ("I adopted a neutral, flat style, without metaphor, violence or emotion. The violence comes from the facts, not the writing"), the documentary is "beautiful, simple, philosophical, refined" and accurately echoes the motto of France inscribed on the pediments of several secondary schools: “Liberty, equality, fraternity". 

Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students was produced by Rosebud Productions. Be For Films handles international sales.

(Translated from French)