When we got the news this week about Annie Ernaux winning the Nobel Prize it felt like: One of us, finally! Even though Ernaux belongs to a complete different generation, for me she will forever be the one female writer who invented the modern perception of female lives. My life as well, actually. Maybe, more precisely: she is the voice of a certain generation we still feel related to.

I looked very much forward to watching the documentary her son produced from family super-8-home-movies that was shown at Zurich Filmfest last month - and I was highly rewarded.

The aestetics of that material matches her storytelling in a significant way - especially so, as the time frame of the movie material embraces the period in Ernaux´s life when she started to think about writing no longer only into her personal diary. When her marriage began to crumble and she started to find her tender, intimate language to express her political and personal thoughts in a way we had never thought of before.

When we are listening to her very voice commenting from off - if feels as if she´d allow the audience to be part of that process.

How lucky are we that she made it!