Dir. Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot
2022 | 61 mins | France
French with English subtitles

Showing Times

• Sat 01 Jul: 4pm
• Tue 04 Jul: 2pm
• Wed 05 Jul: 6.20pm

This dreamy documentary from Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux and her son David puts together home movies, narrated by Ernaux herself. The film goes beyond the personal and invites us to reflect on time, family, and our memories of ourselves. Ernaux looks at her past self and tells us who this person was beyond what we’re seeing.

“In re-viewing our super eight films, shot between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that they comprised not only a family archive but a testimony to the pastimes, lifestyle and aspirations of a social class in the decade after 1968. I wanted to incorporate these silent images into a story which combined the intimate with the social and with history, to convey the taste and colour of those years.” – Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux’s novels and memoirs have gained her a devoted following (and whose autobiographical L’Événement was adapted just last year into the critically acclaimed film Happening, which screened in Studio 74), opens a treasure trove with this delicate journey into her family’s memory.

Compiled from gorgeously textured home movie images from 1972 to 1981 — when her first books were published, her sons became teenagers, and her husband Philippe brought an 8mm film camera everywhere they went — 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 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.

TRIPLE F-RATED:

Directed by a woman, written by a woman and starring a significant woman.

F-Rating is a new rating for films directed by women, written by women and/or with significant female characters on screen, in their own right. Find out more here >>

∆ BBFC Ration Details:

Brief moderate sex references, scenes of bullfighting

VENUE: EXETER PHOENIX, STUDIO 74

*Subject to a £1.50 ticketing system charge. We don’t charge this to make a profit. Find out more >>