Netflix: Don’t miss one of the best French documentaries of recent years

What is it about?

Emma and Anais are inseparable and yet everything is against them. Teenagers follow their journey from the age of 13 to their adulthood, five years of life where changes and first times occur.

When they turn 18, we wonder what has become of the women and where their friendship is. Through this chronicle of youth, the film also paints a portrait of France over the past five years.

Chronicle of a mobile teenager

How to tell and photograph the period of adolescence? That’s the challenge posed by director Sébastien Lifschitz, who spent five years filming Anais and Emma, ​​two middle school and then high school girls in Brive, in the sub-prefecture of Correz, home to 50,000 people. The choice of a provincial town quickly fell on the filmmaker to avoid the archetype of adolescence in the suburbs or the capital.

If it tells a coming-of-age story, Teens is also a beautiful film about friendship and the test of time about the bonds that unite two young women, especially when everything is against them with completely different personalities and backgrounds, different lives.

We follow Anais and Emma’s daily life, between classes, personal life, friends, love, relationship with parents and extracurricular activities. To accurately capture the closeness of these two young women, Sébastien Lifschitz created a small team for the shoot, consisting of a director of photography, a sound engineer, an assistant, and the prince.

Anais and Emma very quickly forgot the camera, as well as the HF microphones they were carrying, and adapted to the situation, which allowed Sébastien Lifschitz to shoot without too many spectators, but also to be in the center of the action. Hand-held camera.

Sebastien Lifschitz and his editor Tina Baz, after five years of filming, found themselves with a 500-hour run, and after six months of work, the first 12-hour version was created.

In the end, the duo managed to trim the film down to two hours to offer an authentic and moving concentrate of teenage friendship, with both strengths and weaknesses.

The film Adolescentes was an AlloCiné editorial favorite in 2020 and was very well received by critics, receiving a press rating of 4.2/5. The documentary was also blessed by the profession because in 2012 it won no less than 3 Césars: Best Documentary, Best Sound and Best Editing.

Teenage Girls is available on Netflix.