Presented Monday at the Directors' Fortnight, this 1-hour film was born from the desire to reclaim dozens of Super 8 films shot between 1972 and 1981 by her ex-husband, now deceased.

"These films had been stored in a drawer for years and had been somewhat forgotten. One day, we watched them with my sons and my grandchildren. It was there, one thing leading to another, that David proposed to make a film on which I will add a story," the 81-year-old novelist told AFP.

If the idea of ​​making films never really interested her, Annie Ernaux let herself be "taken in the game": "I really got involved in this story that we hear because it was important for me to tell in my words", specifies the one who was finalist of the prestigious international Booker prize in 2019.

"Winning My Freedom"

In the film, the viewer discovers a married Annie Ernaux with two young children.

Each time, the writer is in the foreground, omnipresent.

But on closer inspection, it is a frail woman, uncomfortable in her new life that the public meets.

A woman torn between her duties as a wife, her bourgeois life, she class defector as she told in "La place", and her irrepressible desire to write.

It was also at this time that she wrote her first book "Les Armoires vides" (1974).

Not a film of memories, it documents, of course, the years that forged her as a writer but also describes an era, that of the glorious Thirties and the thirst for life of a generation in search of emancipation, leisure and travel. .

Today read, translated and studied all over the world, Annie Ernaux nevertheless took several years to emancipate herself from her domestic life in order to write.

"I can affirm that these ten years are the major years in my life because they will confirm my desire to write. And then also because I will gain my freedom. A freedom that I suffered from not having, even if I think that I, myself, made a marriage of love".

Not an icon

"I think that for the spectator, it may be a story that is new, really new for him, to see me and to hear me tell things about my intimacy and at the same time, this intimacy belongs to everyone. “, she continues.

Finally, "it is both the story of my life but also that of thousands of women who have also been in search of freedom and emancipation".

French writer Annie Ernaux at the screening of her film "Les Années Super 8", at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, May 23, 2022 Julie SEBADELHA AFP

If several of her books have been adapted to the cinema, including "L'évenement", an autobiographical account of the clandestine abortion she suffered in 1964, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021, Annie Ernaux says she is not interested in this medium.

The reason ?

"I write with the inner images, the images of memory. The process of writing for cinema is very different", she explains.

At a time when the right to abortion is questioned in the United States, what does the woman whose work is crossed by these questions think?

"I think we could wait for this conservative wave because when women take power .... or rather when their voices rise, men show solidarity with each other," she replies.

And to add "that in France as in the United States, women are no longer willing to let things happen".

A true feminist icon for several generations, Annie Ernaux simply confides that she feels "woman. A woman who writes, that's all".

His latest book "The Young Man" was published in early May by Gallimard.

© 2022 AFP