If the writer Christine Angot initially chose to tell her story and the incest of which she was a victim in words, today she reveals herself through pictures in the documentary called “Family”.
In this film, which should be seen in cinemas today, he has to go to Strasbourg for professional reasons for the launch of his new book Le Voyage dans l’Est. It is not an ordinary place for him, but a city marked by memories and real family dramas: it is where his father lived until his death in 1999, and where he first met her at the age of thirteen. He started raping her.
“I want it to be the same truth as in the book”
His father’s widow still lives there, and Christine Angotti, accompanied by a camera, decides to knock on her door. After years of silence, it is time for dialogue. “I want to know the story he tells himself, what his face looks like when he says the sentences. How does one live face to face with someone who says: 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…” entrusts the writer to explain his approach.
This confrontation opens the film with intensity. For the director, the presence of the camera is a way to feel supported in this ordeal, but also to show the events as they unfold and how he experiences them. “We have a real scene there. We are in reality. Nothing was written in advance, neither a reconstruction nor a script. We are in the pure present. We are not in the imagination.“
Throughout the documentary, interviews follow each other with her relatives, her mother, ex-husband and daughter, including excerpts from the family archives. An exchange that raises awareness about incest and rape, and how they affect both those around the victim and the perpetrators.
Screened in the Encounters selection at the 74th Berlinale last February and awarded the Tagesspiegel Readers’ Jury Prize, Christine Ango’s film Une famille opens in French cinemas today.
Source: Allocine
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