18/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Christine Angot lifts the veil on the unthinkable in a radical, highly personal and incredibly powerful documentary about the incest she was subjected to in her youth

Christine Angot and her daughter Éléonore in A Family

"I don’t know whether it will be possible for us to talk one day, before we all depart this Earth, but I think it would be a good idea". There are events which take place which are terribly distressing for those who live through them, and which leave burning-hot marks on lives; intimate crimes so appalling and so taboo that society has a tendency to look away, to sweep them under the carpet so as not to deal with them, especially when they unfold in a very close context. This is the case with incest, and it’s these closed doors, these consciences which have been locked away and hidden by their owners that writer Christine Angot has decided to break down in A Family, a staggering documentary presented in the Encounters competition of the 74th Berlinale.

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"I don’t want to know” - “I don’t want to know: that’s a brutal thing to say” - “I don’t want to judge” - “That’s brutal too". We’re in Strasbourg, in the living room of an apartment where two women are talking. The subject of their discussion is the incest which the now-dead husband of one of these women inflicted for years upon the other woman, who is the daughter of the man’s first marriage; events which took place 50 years earlier and which first started when Christine Angot was 13. Two women who have been reunited for a stupefying one-on-one which the former has avoided like the plague until now (she’s known the truth for almost 25 years) despite the many entreaties of the latter who has eventually decided to pay her a surprise visit, quite literally getting her foot in the door, accompanied by Caroline Champetier and her camera. What follows is an unprecedented discussion lasting twenty or so minutes, an exchange which is incredibly tense but also middle-class polite, where the major issue at hand (why her stepmother’s radio silence after she discovered the unthinkable?) is laid on the table: "I don’t want your pity; it’s comforting but it doesn’t help me. Your sorrow comes from a sense of contempt, of superiority. If you’d had any respect for me, you would have got in contact with me, you wouldn’t feel sorrow for victims of incest more generally". It’s also a meeting which is purported to have earned the director an accusation of forcible entry (we have to commend the bravery of the film’s producers in this respect, who prioritised the need to get a message across over potential legal repercussions).

"People never talk about it, they’re ashamed". Following in the wake of a determined filmmaker who will be forced to shoulder this indelible pain for the rest of her life - the brutal fallout of which she contains as best she can - and pursuing other conversations (with her mother, the two partners she’s had in her life - one of whom carries his own onerous childhood secret - and her thirty-year-old daughter), A Family takes a head-on approach to uncovering that which is often silenced and buried deep. It’s a shocking film which stays with the viewer, and which has been skilfully interspersed in the editing phase (headed up by Pauline Gaillard) with photos of the director and private videos from the period spanning 1993-1995, focusing on Christine Angot and Paul when they were a couple, but primarily on their little daughter Éléonore. Images of innocence over which the shadow of the incest haunting her mother looms indescribably, like a vampire which can only be petrified by the luminescence of words: a luminescence assuredly achieved by this uncategorisable and vital documentary.

Produced by Le Bureau Films in co-production with Rectangle Productions and France 2 Cinéma, A Family is sold worldwide by The Bureau Sales, with Nour Films managing distribution in France.

(Translated from French)