Judith Godrèche has started filming Memoir of a Girl, adapted from Annie Ernaux

The filmmaker has assembled an impressive female cast for her second feature film.

After her striking speech at the 2024 César Awards and her short film Me Too, the rise of which was one of the highlights of the Cannes Film Festival, Judith Godreche is maintaining her course. That of a committed director who puts the feminist issue at the heart of her career choices.

In the ideological journey of the actress and filmmaker, there is the discovery of Annie Ernaux, the writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. And it seems logical that Godreche is now embarking on the adaptation of one of her works. In this case Girl’s memorypublished in 2016.

Shooting of the film started this week and will last for a month between Ile-de-France and Normandy. The opportunity to discover the official synopsis and distribution of this project produced by Carole Lambert (Windy Production) and Marc Missonnier (Moana Films), the duo behind Consent.

Thanks to a dedication in Normandy, Annie Ernaux, 70 years old, plunges into memories of the summer when she was 17, in 1958. That summer, she left her native town to be a summer camp instructor. From the first party, the head instructor begins to deflower her. Finding him handsome, she lets him do it, as if in spite of herself… Her body becomes a foreign place for her, an offering to be sacrificed.

Young Annie Ernaux will be played by Tess Barthelemy (the daughter of Judith Godrèche and Maurice Barthelemy), and in her older version by Valérie Dréville, a great theater and cinema actress recently seen as a judge in Saint Omer.

Among the curiosities of the casting, we can note Maïwène Barthélémy in her first role since Twenty Godswhich earned her the César for best female revelation last February. And the presence of singer Marguerite Dedeyan, revealed during the last Star Academy, who has already made her cinema debut this year in The mix of genresby Michel Leclerc (photo below). She is also a committed artist who made noise by revealing her bisexuality in her song, “Lesfilles, les meufs”.

We will also find in Girl’s memory : Ariane Labed, Louis Peres, Lancelot Courcieras, Louise Labeque, Esther Archambault, Marilou Aussilloux, Guslagie Malandra, Alice Da Ruz, Anna Mouglalis…

This adaptation resonates strongly for Judith Godrèche, fascinated by the work of the writer to whom we owe in particular La Place (Renaudot prize in 1984), The Years Or The Eventwhich was brought to the screen by Audrey Diwan in 2021.

A few months ago, Godrèche accompanied Annie Ernaux during an awards ceremony at the University of Rouen, as she documented it on her Instagram account. Last year, she also published in the New Obs a very beautiful text on his relationship to this major figure of French literature and feminism:

“You did not write “Girl’s Memory” for me, dear Annie, I know that, and yet.
There is, all around, in Cergy, in France, in the world and elsewhere,
A crowd of girls who bear neither your first name nor mine,
Whose memoirs you wrote.”