One of France’s most respected contemporary writers, Annie Ernaux’s intimate and autobiographical body of work captures the inner lives of women alongside societal and cultural changes in France from the 1960s onwards. A natural extension of her literary work in its form and content, The Super 8 Years shows the pastimes, lifestyle and aspirations of a social class in post-1960s France through the lens of the Ernaux family archive. Ernaux will be awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature on December 10th, 2022.
The Super 8 Years made its World Premiere at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year and has since played prominently on the international festival circuit, including bows at the Busan, Rome, New York and Zurich Film Festivals. Composed of silent Super 8 home video footage shot by Annie Ernaux’s then husband Philippe Ernaux, the film features pensive voiceover narration written and performed by Ernaux. The Super 8 Years is the directorial debut for Ernaux, whose autobiographical novel L’Événement was adapted last year into the critically acclaimed film Happening.
The French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux, whose novels and memoirs have earned her a devoted following, opens a treasure trove with this delicate journey into her family’s memory, chronicling the period when her first books were published, her sons became teenagers, and her husband Philippe brought an 8mm film camera everywhere they went. Compiled from gorgeously textured home movie images shot between 1972 and 1981, this portrait of a time, place, and moment of personal and political significance takes us from holidays and family rituals in suburban bourgeois France to trips abroad in Albania and Egypt, Spain and the USSR. Supplying her own introspective voiceover, Ernaux and her co-filmmaker, her son David, guide the viewer through fragments of a decade, diffuse and vivid in equal measure. The Super 8 Years is a remarkable visual extension of Ernaux’s ongoing literary project to make sense of the mysterious past and the unknowable future.
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