The Years

The Years is a production featuring an all-female cast directed by Eline Arbo. Based on the European bestseller by Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022.

In The Years, five actresses collectively narrate the life of one woman against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world. Raised amidst the aftermath of World War II, she breaks free from her middle-class upbringing, and becomes a writer with a sharp political and social awareness. She grows up amidst the debris of the Second World War, disentangles herself from her middle-class environment and becomes a writer with a sharp political and social awareness. Using photos, songs and news reports, she talks about emancipation, being a woman, sexuality, class differences and individual opportunities. In separate scenes, musical, happy and melancholic memories are evoked. By following one life, we see the world change. The hyper-personal history of a French woman thus becomes a universal biography of post-war Western Europe.

"All images will disappear. Death erases everything in a second and so we have to save something from the time where we will never be again." – from The Years

The Years is the prize-winning and critically acclaimed masterpiece by French author Annie Ernaux. De Standaard der Letteren called it a "dazzling history of a time and of a life". For director Eline Arbo, it is dream material. The book brings together the two lines that she explores in her work, on the one hand the 'sociological' view of The End with Eddy (2020) and on the other hand the powerful women as protagonists of The Hours (2021) and Yerma (2021).

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