Like her previous film, “Elementary”, Claire Simon’s latest work pays homage to the educational process, once again opening the doors of school classrooms. This time, texts by Annie Ernaux – a French feminist, writer and Nobel Prize winner – are on the curriculum. Ernaux describes her concept of autosociobiography as “writing life, not mine, nor theirs, nor even one in particular. Life with situations that we all go through, but that we, as individuals, experience differently. Body image, education, the sense of belonging, sexual condition, social trajectory, the existence of others, disease, grief. […] I did not try to write about myself, to write a book about my life. I made use of my life, of the general, ordinary events of my life, of the situations and feelings I have experienced. As if it were material I needed to explore to grasp and uncover some kind of perceptible truth.”
The teachers create smart frameworks for discussions filled with freedom and dynamics, where the young people reveal themselves in all their beauty and vulnerability, extrapolating the author’s experiences to their own lives. And this is when Claire Simon’s “writing life camera” documents charming moments of how Ernaux’s texts empower and inspire them, as they passionately delve into her words.