The director of Teenagers and Little Girl is honored this evening on Arte

In 2020, director Sébastien Lifshitz returned to business with two powerful documentaries, Adolescentes and Petite fille. In the first, like Richard Linklater in Boyhood, he filmed for five years the almost quiet adolescence of Anaïs and Emma in Corrèze. From 13 to 18 years old, they grew up in front of Sébastien Lifshitz’s camera, from first love to first time, through first bereavement, first exams and recurring arguments. A mirror of their adolescence and contemporary France, the film also reflects the social determinism that will guide the trajectories of these two teenagers. Like many childhood friends, Anaïs and Emma have nothing in common, except perhaps their spontaneity, their rejection of authority and their humour, which adolescent stupidity cannot alter. And if they do not deliver any performance here, they succeed in something perhaps even more difficult: letting us observe them grow, change, make mistakes, cry, laugh or fail by inviting us into each of the less glorious corners of this delicate period of life.Arte or “the delicatessen of cinema”: interview with Olivier Père, its programmerIn the second, huge success during its first prime time broadcast on Arte, Sébastien Lifshitz focused on another period of life , the childhood and the somewhat special one of Sacha, a little transgender girl. If her family supports her against all odds, if the children around her accept her without really talking about it, for some adults and the teaching staff, this transidentity is difficult to accept. They are often the ones who make her cry with their lack of compassion and who transform her difference into a burden that is sometimes too heavy for this 8-year-old child to bear. moments of life, between meetings at school, ballet lessons and sessions with the child psychiatrist, sometimes simple markers of a childhood like the others, sometimes a real battle. is available on NetflixAdolescentes is broadcast tonight at 8:55 p.m. followed by Petite fille at 11:05 p.m. Adolescentes will be available for replay on Arte TV from September 21 to October 27 and Petite fille from September 21 to November 26.