Les Années Super 8 - English subtitled
Thoughtful documentary in which Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux reflects on the ins and outs of her young family during the seventies through home movies.
In 1972, writer Annie Ernaux and her husband Philippe Ernaux bought a Super 8 camera. Over the subsequent decade, Philippe used it to capture family life with their two sons, from distant journeys to intimate moments – blowing out candles on a birthday cake, cycling without training wheels. Ernaux working on her first books. But the documentary also zooms out, for example when the family travels to Chile, where Pinochet just rose to power.
As the children grow older and the marriage begins to come unstuck, the camera focuses more on the horizon and less on the people close by, eventually leaving the family behind altogether. Ernaux tells the story of her disintegrating family in the same melancholic and wise tone that characterizes her magnificent oeuvre. LES ANNÉES SUPER 8, which she made with her son, is the cinematic testament of a great writer.