“With the camera, I feel very close to people”: Claire Simon on Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students

It’s no surprise to learn that Claire Simon is a fan of Annie Ernaux. Simon is an acclaimed filmmaker whose sensitive, understated films straddle fiction and documentary, elevating the everyday drama of human experience to cinematic art. Ernaux is a Nobel-prize winning auto-fiction pioneer, who has translated her life story – a journey from humble grocer’s daughter to feminist icon in France and beyond – into sublime literature. 

Both blend the intimate with the universal; Ernaux through autobiographical books such as Simple Passion, The Years and Happening (adapted into a film in 2021), and Simon through films such as Gare du Nord (2013), in which a fictional love affair unfolds against the real backdrop of the busy train station, or Our Body (2023), in which Simon follows patients in a Paris gynaecology ward, documenting her own cancer diagnosis in the process.

When Simon was approached to make a film about Ernaux by French television she was naturally interested, but she was also not inclined to make a conventional biopic. Instead she drew on her longstanding curiosity about young people – established with films such as Récréations (1992), which is set during recess in a Parisian primary school, and The Competition (2016), about students competing to enter film school – to offer a different kind of portrait. 

In Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, Simon visits a series of classrooms around France and Guiana, capturing in unadorned cinéma vérité style, conversations between students and teachers as they study the author’s work. Like Ernaux’s celebrated “l’écriture plate” (“flat writing”), Simon’s approach is deceptively simple, but beneath the unassuming surface lie profound and political ideas, as the students’ discussions circle questions of class, identity and gender.

In this interview, conducted shortly after Writing Life screened at the French Film Festival UK, Simon discusses her interest (or not) in institutions, cinema as sublimation, and the intergenerational power of Ernaux’s writing.

You’ve shot films with students before, in schools and universities. What is it that interests you about educational institutions?

For filmmakers, an institution is a way to find people. A school is like a hospital or the justice system. The institution opens the door to different people. It’s like when I made Our Body. How else could I meet a young girl who wanted an abortion, an older woman dying of cancer, and a young African woman giving birth? It would be impossible otherwise.

The institution makes the story, but the institution itself doesn’t interest me, it’s not the point. The point here was the young people who are reading Ernaux, who are obliged to read her, and how they identify with her, or not. Do they feel touched? The classes that are in the film are with good teachers who are organising discussions between the students. But I didn’t seek out specific classes, it’s all random. The only thing that isn’t random is the fact that I also went to Guiana.

Why did you go to Guiana?

Because nobody goes there! Historically Guiana was the jail of France, a place where unwanted people were sent. In France, Annie Ernaux is known as a ‘transfuge de classe’ [‘class defector’]. She is someone from a lower class, who, through her studies and writing, travelled up the class system. When Ernaux won the Nobel Prize, she said in her speech “j’écrirai pour venger ma race” [“I will write to avenge my race”]. That quote comes from Arthur Rimbaud, and she was referring to class. In Guiana though, there is a classroom full of young Black girls. When the teacher says, “Do you remember what she said in her speech for the Nobel,” he begins the sentence, “I will…” And the whole class says, “I will write to avenge my race.” That phrase takes on another meaning in this context. I was also very happy that there was a comparison between Creole and the Normandy language. That was my aim, going to Guiana. To see these kids, from different racial backgrounds, and to ask what they thought of Ernaux.

The film feels very intimate. How do you achieve this sense of trust with your subjects?

I never give the camera to anyone else. I have a very good sound engineer, he’s really a genius of sound. I go into the school, and explain to the students what I am doing, that I am coming to see how they discuss the books, and that through this I will make a portrait of Annie Ernaux. It’s not difficult for them to start talking at all.

You see, this is my way of being. With the camera, I feel very close to people, much closer than when I don’t have it. I remember, when I was making my film Mimi [2003] I would walk to set and meet interesting people all the time, which is not at all the kind of thing which happens to me normally. It comes from being in this state of research, of searching for something.

I’m very lucky, these girls and boys were extraordinarily free and generous. They would just talk, and they would be perfect. I think they feel they can trust me, and I can trust them. I really love filming children and teenagers. I think the beauty in art, and especially in cinema, comes from sublimation. Something happens between you and the people you are filming. It’s beautiful.

The film also celebrates the bravery of teachers, who talk honestly about difficult subjects – abortion, sexuality, gender – which might be seen by parents and politicians as controversial.

Absolutely. These teachers trust their students. This idea of exploring through discussion, like an agora, is wonderful. I have a friend who thinks the film is very political, because it shows that you can arrive at a philosophy through discussion between equals. These teachers really believe in that.

What the students think is important because when you’re 16 or 17, what you read impresses you for the rest of your life. If you read. Ernaux’s books are short, they seem to be very easy to read. But they talk about everyday life, important, ordinary things – ordinary things, like sex and abortion! I love it when one of the girls in Toulouse says, “We don’t live in stories written by Balzac.” Of course, we don’t live those stories!

What does Annie Ernaux think of Writing Life?

She’s seen the film three times, she’s a fan. We were together in Venice, and she watched it first just by herself. It’s wonderful. She loves it. It shows that young people are completely taken by her books, and that there is a future in her writing: her work will not end with her own life.

Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students screened at the French Film Festival UK.