The young man / The event

Annie is in her mid-fifties and begins an affair with a man thirty years her junior. A student who is still attached to the milieu from which she believes she has established herself. Although this relationship may seem out of place and shocking to society, it gives Annie a feeling of liberation from shame and class, but also an unexpected return to her own past: from her lover's mattress, Annie sees the hospital where she was admitted as a young student over 30 years ago after an illegal abortion. With unsparing candor, Annie looks back on her former self, her unwanted pregnancy, the gauntlet that led her from doctors to an angel maker who performed the procedure she barely survived. In her double bill, director Jessica Glause combines two texts by the French Nobel Prize winner, which are already in direct dialog with each other: Annie Ernaux links her unequal love affair with her return to the past and finds a language for the humiliations she experienced and the struggle for self-determination that itself becomes an event.