Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2026
March 5 - 15
Claire Simon (I Want to Talk About Duras, NYFF59) travels to high schools across France, as well as French Guinea, to document young people of all backgrounds reacting to the work of acclaimed author Annie Ernaux.
Three years after Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for decades of autofiction and journalism, Claire Simon (I Want to Talk About Duras, NYFF59) finds fresh new contexts for her work in this unorthodox documentary tribute. Rather than interviewing Ernaux herself, Simon travels to high schools across France, as well as French Guinea, where students grapple with 10 of her most important books, forming a winning companion piece to 2024’s Elementary, Simon’s portrait of a Paris elementary school. Speaking as frankly as the acclaimed author of Happening and Simple Passion, among other landmark texts, young people of all backgrounds connect Ernaux’s rigorous self-interrogation to their own experiences with parents, diasporic upbringings, and sexual taboos. Inside and outside of the classroom, these teenagers are open and winning before Simon’s experienced, compassionate eye.
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