Kino Lorber has landed North American rights to Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical film “The Super 8 Years” (“Les années Super-8”). A press release announced that the archival documentary composed of silent Super 8 footage of her family from 1972 to 1981 will be released at the Lincoln Center December 16, six days after Ernaux is awarded with the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Directed by Ernaux and her son, David Ernaux-Briot, “The Super 8 Years” features voiceover narration from the celebrated author and highlights “the inner lives of women alongside societal and cultural changes in France from the 1960s onwards,” per its synopsis. The film is described as a “natural extension of her literary work in its form and content” that provides a case study of “the pastimes, lifestyle, and aspirations of a social class in post-1960s France through the lens of the Ernaux family archive.”

Kino Lorner SVP Wendy Lidell praised Ernaux for writing “about life directly as she experiences it, capturing the texture of memory with introspective candor and unflagging wit alongside larger societal observations.” “The Super 8 Years,” which premiered at this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, continues this tradition, “with Annie’s own indelible voice bringing her most intimate family memories to life,” Lidell said. 

Ernaux has penned over 20 works of fiction and memoir throughout her prolific career, receiving the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her literary corpus. Two of her works were recently adapted for the big screen: “Happening” and “Simple Passion.”  Both films were helmed by women. The former, co-written and directed by Audrey Diwan, tells the story of a woman seeking an illegal abortion in France in the 1960s, and won Venice Film Festival’s top prize at the 2021 edition of the fest. The latter, written and helmed byDanielle Arbid, is a 2020 drama about a woman’s two-year affair with a married man. 

“The Super 8 Films” will be released on digital December 20, with a home video release to follow in 2023.