27 August 2025
Biografilm arrives at Casa I Wonder (Lungomare Marconi 56F) in Venice with the presentation of the Celebration of Lives Award to writer Annie Ernaux during the screening of Claire Simon's film Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through The Eyes Of High School Students (documentary, France, 2025, 90') at the Giornate Degli Autori.
On Thursday 28 August from 5pm to 6pm at Casa I Wonder, there will be IL MONDO IN PRIMA PERSONA (THE WORLD IN FIRST PERSON): MEETING WITH ANNIE ERNAUX AND CLAIRE SIMON will be held at Casa I Wonder, during which Biografilm co-director Massimo Benvegnù will give Annie Ernaux the Celebration of Lives Award, which Biografilm dedicates to great storytellers who have left a profound mark on contemporary life in various fields of art and society through their works and their lives. The meeting will be moderated by writer, director and critic Manlio Castagna.
Biografilm's Celebration of Lives has always happily extended its scope beyond the criteria of a film festival, choosing to reward the journeys and careers of those who have lived intensely but above all have been able to build bridges through their testimony, care and work to enrich the lives of others, of everyone. We cannot hide our excitement at the fact that Annie Ernaux has agreed to join Biografilm's list of honourees. She is an author who has profoundly redefined the genre of autofiction, whose writing is an act of courage and precision, an almost surgical dissection of memory and lived experience, which does not merely recount her life, but uses it as a lens to explore universal themes." say our directors Chiara Liberti and Massimo Benvegnù.
The film Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through The Eyes Of High School Students will premiere on Friday 29 August at Giornate degli Autori (11.15 am, Sala Perla), in the presence of the director and writer Annie Ernaux.
This is also the film with which Italian distributor IWonder and its educational department I Wonder Scuole will open the school year at the Giornate del Cinema per la Scuola in Palermo (24-26 September), an event that is part of the National Cinema and Images for Schools Plan promoted by MIM and MIC. A film that brings together generations, cultures, literature and cinema, and those who believe in and practise participatory pedagogy.
By placing her camera in French classrooms, Claire Simon captures the vitality of Annie Ernaux's words and their impact on her teenage readers, who identify with her story. Her books give voice to a generation that, through shared reading in the classroom, finds the words to express itself, reflecting on class differences, generational conflicts, gender equality and the desire to find one's identity without denying one's roots. From a non-Eurocentric perspective, the film focuses on young people and the role that literature and art more generally play in building intergenerational dialogue. Claire Simon's cinema of reality meets the social and existential inquiry of Annie Arnaux's writing, reminding us of the need to bring pedagogy into the classroom that educates for dialogue and provides young people with tools to attribute meaning to the world in which they live.
