Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras´ extensive work in the cinema has generated interest in her novels, which are being read and appreciated by a wide audience.

In this film Marguerite Duras tells us about her life. The first part of the film was shot shortly before the publication of her novel THE LOVER (L'AMANT) in 1984 and the second part in 1993 when THE LOVER FROM NORTHERN CHINA (L'AMANT DE LA CHINE DE NORD) was published.

Marguerite Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914, in Indochina (now Vietnam), where her parents came to teach from northern France. Her father died when she was young, and her mother undertook the rearing of two sons and a daughter by farming a government land grant. Duras' attachment to her older brother and her ambivalent feelings towards her feisty and domineering mother are sketched in many of her novels, most particularly in THE SEA WALL (UN BARRAGE CONTRE LE PACIFIQUE).

In 1931 Duras went to Paris to continue her education, earning a licence in law and political science in 1935. She has a deep concern for human values, and some of her fiction from the early 1970's is definitely marked by the events in France of May 1968, which proclaimed an end to excessive governmental control and a more egalitarian society. For most part, however, Duras' novels address political issues indirectly. Her talent as a writer lie in character portrayal, particularly in her studies of female protagonists caught in the imaginative re-creation of a passionate love.

Duras has become a highly visible, often controversial figure on the French literary scene. The publication of THE LOVER in 1984 was met with widespread acclaim.

After 1969 Duras turned to filmmaking as her principal activity, perhaps encouraged by the success of her scenario for Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR.