1997 film by Claire Simon

A major figure in contemporary feminism and the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux is seen by many as a source of individual and collective emancipation, blending the intimate with the universal. Filmmaker Claire Simon has devoted an original portrait to her, giving students and teachers a voice.

1990 documentary film by Claire Simon

2023 documentary film

15-year-old Livia gets back on her feet after falling from her horse with the help of Jean, a volunteer fireman with whom she falls in love. A few days later, vacation begins. June 24. The girl, alone and exasperated, will stop at nothing to conquer this older man; her passion burns more and more. Her love consumes her, driving her into a mounting frenzy, until she commits an irreparable act.

Every day, Ismael (Reda Kateb) is dazzled, fascinated and exhausted by his favourite place: the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Set on a series of long walks through the streets of Nice and the mountain village of Saorge, Mimi charts the psychogeography of the filmmaker’s long time friend Mimi Chiola. Simon allows her subject to guide the conversation, pulling the viewer into Mimi’s discursive, enveloping stories of love, sex, work, life and friendship. (from Metrograph.com)

A realist dramedy about dedicated social workers who devote their long shifts to helping pregnant women.

Claire Simon portrays an important time for any individual, from 16 to 18 years of age. Set in the Paris suburbs in high school (for those lucky enough to go), teenagers chat after and even during class, sitting in the hallway or outside on a bench, looking at the city below them.

French director Claire Simon, a prolific maker of fiction and documentary films, unites the two forms in her surprising latest, a precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa. Dramatized as a pair of dialogues based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (played on screen by Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos, an expert interrogator and a mesmerizing listener), Simon’s film underlines the sexual imbalances and power plays that defined their fraught love life while maintaining the mysteries and ambiguities that marked Duras’s singular artistic corpus.

An all-access tour behind the scenes at France’s premiere film school, La Fémis. Showing us how successful candidates get to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as Louis Malle, François Ozon and Alain Resnais, all of whom attended this prestigious institution. Stumbling over their words, the often-nervous candidates seem vulnerable when confronted with the veterans of the industry, who have the difficult task of discovering true talent among all these eager young people.