How can we tell differently about Annie Ernaux who, for fifty years, has made her life, her experiences and her memories the raw material for her works? Coralie Miller asked herself this question at length while preparing her documentary on the author, Annie Ernaux, I was born somewherebroadcast Friday on France 5 and available on the france.tv platform. And she ended up finding her angle: Normandy.
“At first I thought about calling the film The first twenty-five years because, in this region, for twenty-five years, she grew up as a girl, fond of books, loving to write and wanting to express herself. As the daughter of traders, too. It was her personal and intellectual matrix,” explains the director to 20 Minutes.
“I think I got there just before she had enough.”
And continues: “Her story, we know, is that of a class defector. She evolved culturally, socially, thanks to her studies. At 25, Annie Duschesne became Annie Ernaux by getting married and leaving Normandy. Her personal and family geography mixes with her evolution as a woman, committed and writer. »
Coralie Miller, who was passionate about the works of Annie Ernaux as a reader, made her first contact with her two years ago, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to her. “It’s the only film she agreed to participate in. I think I arrived just before she had enough, she says. Throughout the filming, I regularly heard her say that she was in such demand, even more so since the Nobel Prize, that her main concern was no longer having the time she needed to be able to write. »
“Approach this sensitivity to which we do not have access”
The timing was right and, in the director’s words, the planets aligned. While she began an email correspondence with the author of The Event and Yearsshe learned that she was going to make her comeback, in September 2023, in Lillebonne, her hometown, where she was invited to inaugurate the Book Festival. “She was supposed to spend two days there. It was the first time she was officially invited there. I asked to follow her and I was the only camera authorized to accompany her on this journey, underlines Coralie Miller. This return corresponded exactly to what I wanted to say. There was something very emotional for Annie Ernaux. I was able to get as close as possible to this sensitivity that we don’t necessarily have access to with her. This was my way of telling it differently. »
Annie Ernaux, I was born somewhere paints, in around fifty an hour, the portrait of a major writer of the 20th and 21st centuries, who also became an icon of feminism. Coralie Miller initially envisioned her documentary as an “admirer” film, even if she concedes that this term is “still a bit strong”. She thus prefers to speak of “tribute”.
What does it feel like to form a bond and follow closely a personality who matters to us? “I didn’t think of Annie Ernaux as a person,” replies the director. Before meeting her, my relationship with her focused on her writing, on what she said, on her commitments. I didn’t know what to expect. But I felt a great humanity in her. She is a feminist and I am too, I said to myself that this could create complicity. A meeting happened between Annie and me, which is reflected, I think, in the film, in the way she responded to me and let me approach her so closely. I discovered a woman of great sensitivity and kindness. »
“She goes straight to the point, there is no pretense”
The two women have had many meetings, in Normandy, but also in Cergy and Paris, one in front and the other behind the camera. Coralie Miller thus discovered that her interlocutor could be “categorical”: “There was a fairly frank relationship between us. She goes straight to the point, there is no pretense.”
At the end of the documentary, Annie Ernaux confides to him that she “writes about the present in (her) diary” and adds: “for others, after my death”. “Is this the last time we speak?” », Asks the director. “No, you don’t need it anymore, I have nothing more to say,” the author replies. “And she left like that. There was nothing unpleasant about it at all, Coralie Miller tells us. We continued to talk afterwards, but I told myself that I had my final words. »
