Anna is nine years old. For her, life is simple, consisting of order and routines. A life that peacefully and comfortably unfolds between Paris and Bordeaux, between her religious school, her home with her parents, Marie and Fernando, and her maternal grandparents’ vineyard. The only shadow cast over this ideal picture is an uncle, down there in Spain, who’s fighting Franco. He’s a communist, about whom nothing must be mentioned. “Communist,” “pro-Franco” – words and commitments that have a powerful meaning in 1970. For Anna is nine years old in 1970. But soon her ordered existence will become complicated. Her uncle’s arrest and death, a journey to Chile, several encounters… So many events whose importance Anna doesn’t perceive, but which will profoundly change her parents. Political commitment, altruism, fighting against imperialism, feminism, elections, demonstrations are now the keywords and the events that punctuate the lives of Marie and Fernando.
For Anna, the shift in her parents’ world means other words and events: moving house, disorganization, changing nannies, a smaller apartment, new faces. So she resists, and fights with her meagre weapons. But the upheavals imposed upon her are too important. Her parents change inexorably. She’s marked by her new encounters. Her understanding of the world deepens. And like her mother and father, she changes, but differently from them. Anna grows up and accepts this new life. However she now casts her own gaze on the world and those around her.

November 29, 2006

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