Annie Ernaux, visiting her hometown for a signing to mark her new release, is suddenly struck by memories of her past. In the summer of 1958, eighteenyear- old Annie (Tess Barthélemy) joins a summer camp as a counselor to young children. As feelings grow tangled among the counselors, Annie hopes her relationship with H (Victor Bonnel) will blossom into romance. But H, repeatedly invoking his own fiancée, treats her as nothing more than a diversion. Director Judith Godreche, who examined sexual assault and the structural issues beneath it in her short film Moi aussi, broadens that same inquiry here by way of Annie Ernaux’s novel A Girl’s Story. In the film, a middle-aged Annie Ernaux looks back on her teenage years as a third-person observer of herself. What stands out is how the film addresses gendered power dynamics and the violence embedded within them, while still portraying its heroine as an agent of her own story rather than an object. Tess Barthelemy, the director’s own daughter, delivers a persuasive performance charting the transformation of a once dreamy, wide-eyed Annie. The film delicately weaves together the growth of a girl starved for love and friendship with the trajectory by which that period would later become the making of a writer. (CHO Hyunna)