In the masterclass she gave at Dok Leipzig 2025, French filmmaker Claire Simon shared a conversation as intimate as it was lucid about her way of understanding documentary cinema, focusing on the creative process behind Écrire la vie (Writing Life), her film inspired by the work of Annie Ernaux. The talk, moderated by festival director Christophe Terrichter, was a journey through her cinematic thinking, her influences, and her conviction that filming life is, in itself, a form of writing.
Simon explained that the title of her film comes from a key idea in Ernaux’s work: it is not about writing “my life,” but about “writing life”—that is, transforming the intimate into something universal. She recalled that her project was originally going to be called You Talk About Us, evoking the emotion young readers feel when they recognize their own experiences in an author’s words. However, the final title, she noted, better reflects the collective dimension of Ernaux’s work and its resonance with other people’s lives.
Throughout the conversation, Simon blurred the boundaries between fiction and documentary, asserting that the choice between one form and another depends more on the ethical and logistical possibilities of filming reality than on aesthetic considerations. “When I make fiction, it’s because the people are dead or because I can’t film it in real life,” she confessed. Documentary, by contrast, is for her the territory of direct experience, attentive observation, and chance. “I don’t plan anything. If you go looking for what you already know, that’s television, not cinema,” she declared—one of the most quoted lines of the event.
Simon explained that Écrire la vie was filmed in various schools across France and French Guiana, in very different social contexts. Her goal, she said, was to show how Ernaux’s texts—La Place, Les Années, and others—speak to young people from diverse backgrounds, and how literature can serve as a space for reflection on identity, the body, and memory. She highlighted the role of teachers in peripheral regions, “bolder and braver” than many of their peers in Parisian high schools. For Simon, the literary teaching she filmed is not exceptional: “Teachers in the provinces do wonderful things; they take risks.”
She also spoke about her influences: Frederick Wiseman, Johan van der Keuken, Raymond Depardon, and Jean Eustache, whom she considers pillars of contemporary documentary cinema. “When I saw Depardon’s Numéro Zéro, I thought: you can do that—you can film real life,” she recalled. She cited Wiseman as a model of patient observation, though she added humorously that she makes films “for the Martians”: “When they arrive, they’ll understand a little better who we are.”
One of the most powerful moments of the dialogue came when Simon described her favorite scene in Écrire la vie: a group of teenagers reading aloud a sexual passage by Ernaux, which sparks a debate about consent, desire, and violence. “The girls are incredible,” she said, visibly moved. “I feel calm about the future—they’re not going to give up.” That scene, she explained, captures the power of literature and cinema as tools of emancipation, capable of addressing the intimate through words and critical gaze alike.
Her way of filming, she added, is guided by listening: “I film with my ears. I only frame in relation to sound.” That attention to sonic detail and to others’ voices defines her style—one that avoids control and embraces intuition. Her cinema, she concluded, does not seek to illustrate ideas but to discover them through encounters with reality.
Claire Simon’s masterclass in Leipzig was, ultimately, a passionate defense of documentary filmmaking as an act of risk and freedom—an art unafraid of chance or fragility. “Documenting is not recording,” she said, “it’s looking and listening until life writes itself.”
