Erinnerung eines Mädchens

The titular “girl” Annie is 17 years old. Filled with images and ideas that she believes she has to live up to, she spends a summer as a counselor at a summer camp. She wants to belong, to fall in love, to experience for herself what everyone her age seems to do as a matter of course. Her first sexual encounter with an older colleague is violent, but Annie forces herself to reinterpret the night as a passionate experience.

Decades later, Annie Ernaux returns to her young self in her writing. In vivid language, she describes the conflict between social expectations and the desire for acceptance. It is only from this temporal distance that the events at the vacation camp can be read as an experience of sexual violence and the interplay of power, exclusion and shame can be recognized.

The precise observations of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux highlight the complex connection between memory and identity and open up a space for exploring sexual socialization and self-empowerment. Anna Klimovitskaya and Dominik Puhl follow this perspective in their first joint project as actress and director. In a monologue version, they expand the text with their own experiences of growing up and make its transferability to general female realities of life visible.

Duration: 1 hour 25 minutes, no break