Yvan Gaillard

Ángel Díaz’s documentary The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache, concentrates on Eustache as cinematic thinker and archivist of his own life. Actors read texts written by Eustache, including the following reflection: “The role of the author in cinema should be one of non-intervention.” This sentence reminds us that he belongs to the greatest of film traditions (he cites Griffith, Renoir, Dreyer, and Lang as his models), the one that sees cinema as a matter of placing the camera in front of reality and capturing it ardently, precisely, and without tricks.

In the summer of 1963, François Mitterrand was going through a deep existential crisis. His political career was at a standstill and, after 19 years of marriage, the couple had grown apart. It was at this point that François Mitterrand met the woman who was to give new meaning to his life. Anne Pingeot, aged 19, was to become the companion of a lifetime, a woman who would be with him throughout his rise to power and who would remain by his side until his last breath. For the first time, Anne Pingeot has agreed to allow the fragments of this passionate love story — hundreds of letters and a diary — to be shown on television, before being donated to the National Library.