Nour Films Christine Angot, here in her first film “Une famille”.
Nour Films
Christine Angot, here in her first film “Une famille”.
CINEMA – It’s no longer a secret. Christine Angot was sexually abused by her father during her adolescence. After having documented this incest for a long time in her novels, the 65-year-old French writer arrives at the cinema, since Wednesday March 20, to once again reestablish its truth in a first hard-hitting documentary film: A family.
Presented at the last Berlinale, A family picks us up in Alsace, in Strasbourg, where her father lived until his death in 1999. It was also there that she met him for the first time at 13, the age from which he started to rape her. His ex-wife and children still live there. With a camera behind her, Christine Angot knocks on their door.
A little disconcerted and initially resistant, her father’s wife ends up opening up to him under pressure. A heated discussion ensued. On the one hand, Christine Angot’s questions. Why did this family never come back to her? Why did they never want to know more about what happened to him? On the other, vague explanations, tinged with embarrassment.
Christine Angot stoic
« In literature, images exist, but they are internals, says the director in the production notes. Whereas in cinema, these are images that we can describe, that we can talk about, and that are proof. You can’t tell me that I make my father’s wife say this or that. It is she who speaks, we see it. »
This is only the first confrontation in the documentary. And already, she sets the tone. Then comes that of the author’s mother. Why didn’t she act? It’s his turn to burst into tears. And what about her ex-husband? He was present on the floor above when Christine Angot, then an adult, was once again a victim of her father. Why didn’t he stop this?
The filmmaker continues interviews with those who said nothing, did nothing, while broadcasting archive videos of her and her family, after the birth of her daughter at the turn of the 1990s, against a backdrop of powerful messages. “ The rapes took place on weekends and holidays ”, we hear him pronounce stoically over images in the sun.
Incest, not a family affair
Since the start of her career in 1990, Christine Angot has written more than twenty novels, including Léonore, always (1994) et Incest (1999), with the narrative thread of his personal history, strongly marked by sexual violence. Treated as “ whore ” In The mask and the feather on France Inter in the late 1990s, she was dragged through the mud in the media for a long time.
Under the threat of a slap from Laurent Baffie, the indecent mockery of Thierry Ardisson and his team, we see her leaving a live show again. The scene – of incredible violence – resurfaces in A family.
Because the novelist’s film is not only a way of confronting her own people, it also denounces a minimization of incest in France. In 2020, one in ten French people said they had been a victim, or around 6.7 million people. A rising statistic. In 2009, the number of victims reached 2 million, according to an Ipsos study. The numbers speak for themselves. This concerns everyone. And not just a family.
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