‘The Super 8 Years,’ From Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux, Sells for Totem Films (EXCLUSIVE)

Naman Ramachandran
·1 min read
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Totem Films has sold “The Super 8 Years,” by Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, to several territories.

The documentary collects 8mm souvenirs of Annie Ernaux before her breakthrough as a writer. It has sold to Scandinavia (Non Stop), Italy (I Wonder), Spain (Filmin), Portugal (Midas), Germany and Austria (Film Kino Text) and Switzerland (Bande à Part). Other key territories are in discussion.

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The film debuted at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year and has had a stellar festival run since then including at Busan, Rome, New York and Zurich.

New Story will release the film in France on Dec. 14, after it is broadcast on Arte.

An eminent writer, Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. Bérénice Vincent and Laure Parleani of Totem told Variety: “This documentary is the on-screen expansion of her powerful, universal and politically charged oeuvre. The Nobel Prize, a truly well deserved recognition, pushes the film even further.”

The film overlays the images with a text written by Annie Ernaux, which she reads as a voice-over.

Annie Ernaux says about the film: “In re-viewing our super 8 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 color of those years.”

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