As a follow-up to her latest novel, Le Voyage dans l’Est, Christine Angot takes a camera and talks with those around her about incest in her first feature-length documentary, Une famille, to be seen in theaters .
If it was through words that the writer Christine Angot initially chose to tell her story and the incest of which she was a victim, it is today through images that she reveals herself in a documentary poignantly titled A Family.
In this film to be seen in cinemas today, she has to go to Strasbourg for professional reasons on the occasion of the release of her new book Le Voyage dans l’Est. It is not an ordinary place for her, but a city marked by memories and a real family drama: it is there that her father lived until his death in 1999, and it is in this same city that she first met him at thirteen, before he started raping her.
“I want there to be the same truth as in a book”
His father’s widow still lives there, and Christine Angot, accompanied by a camera, decides to knock on her door. After years of silence, time for dialogue. “I want to know the story she tells herself, what her face is like when she says the sentences. How she lives confronted with someone who tells her: this happened. And who asks him questions. I want to know the story people tell themselves when we tell them what is, what was, what happened…” confides the writer to explain her approach.
This confrontation opens the film with intensity. For the director, the presence of the camera is both a way of feeling supported in this ordeal, but also of showing the events as they unfold and as she experiences them. “There we have a real scene. We are in reality. Nothing was written in advance, there is no reconstruction or scripting. We are in the pure present. We are not in the imagination.”
Throughout the documentary, interviews follow one another with her relatives, her mother, her ex-husband and her daughter among others, interspersed with extracts from family archives. Exchanges that raise awareness about incest and rape, and the way in which these also affect those around the victim as well as the perpetrator.
Presented in the Encounters selection last February at the 74th Berlinale, and awarded the Tagesspiegel Readers’ Jury Prize, the film Une famille by Christine Angot is released today in French cinemas.