A short film about a quest to find out more about Simone de Beauvoir
Seeking Simone is 19.45 minutes long. In English, and French with subtitles.
It’s 1989. A Melbourne student hears about the book The Second Sex for the first time when she begins university. She learns that it caused a scandal in Paris when it was published in 1949, and also that the ideas were radical and revolutionary.
What was this book about? Who wrote it? She finds a second hand copy of The Second Sex and starts to read it. She only reads the introduction and puts it aside.
Many years later she pulls the book out of a box in the roof. She goes to Paris on a quest to find out more about Simone de Beauvoir and her book.
She talks to a bookseller by the Seine, and goes to the Sorbonne where Beauvoir studied. She finds out that the first translation edited out fifteen percent of Beauvoir’s book. She meets the translators of the new translation of The Second Sex. She talks to a scholar who wrote a biography about Beauvoir, and to a French woman who knew Beauvoir personally. She explores significant places and people in Paris on her quest to find out about its impact and relevance.