On 18 September Marceline Loridan-Ivens (19 March 1928, Epinal) passed away in Paris. She was born in a family originating from Lodz (Poland), which emigrated to France due to anti-semitism. During her working career she was pollster, filmmaker, producer and writer. She was the fourth and last wife of Joris Ivens, whom she first met in 1963. The couple married officially in 1977. Her life was marked by wars.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens
19th of March 1928- 18th of September 2018

Scarred for life
'A survivor'. Armed with a large bunch of red curls, Jewish humour and fanatical energy, Marceline Loridan-Ivens has been beaten through life with resentment and perseverance as a survivor. On her left forearm the number 78750. The number that was brought to her as a 15-year-old in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a brand for the rest of her life. Always petite and small, it seems as if she did not want to grow anymore and only wanted to participate in adult life on her own terms. A life marked by the war. Almost all her later films are about that: war in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Laos, in China during the cultural revolution and in her own life, the destruction of Jews in the Second World War. Yesterday she passed away in Paris, after she went into cardiac arrest. She was the last and fourth wife of the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989), with whom she married in 1977.

Jewish
On the 19th of March 1928 she is born in the French town of Épinal in the Vosges. Her father, Zlama Rozenberg (1901, Shipia) calls her in the Yiddish Meriem Rozenberg, but nobody knows her under this name. Her Jewish name is Myriam, but in order not to make her stand out, her father gives his second daughter the French name Marceline.
In 1919, Marceline's father had emigrated from Łódź to France as a young man, as did two and a half million other Jews from the Yiddish Mitteleuropa, chased away by the many anti-Semitic attacks. There is nothing left of that Yiddish culture in Poland. The railway ran via Oświęcim, the large transfer station between East and West. In France he starts working as a market trader and textile trader. He sets up his own textile factory and becomes better at maintaining his family with five children. At home the parents speak Yiddish, Polish and Russian and read Hebrew. They eat stuffed Fish and kreplers, but are not religious Jewish. She does not understand the language of her parents, and she becomes angry because her father has changed the Jewish family name Rozenberg into the disguising Rosant. From her youth she knows the feeling of being exile. 'I have always lived the exile of my family. It was as if written under my soles of the feet: I must go. Nothing binds me, nowhere. Love bounded me, but it could also join me. I am Jewish, much more than you realize. And even when being Jewish was frozen in me for such a long time, it was me. That is very deeply rooted in me. She calls herself "carrier of suitcases", as a metaphor for her life.

Auschwitz
After the Germans invade France, the family flees to the 'free' part of France, where Petain reigns. In their home in Bollène (Vaucluse), in the winter of 1944, the Gestapo and French police invade after the neighbours have indicated them. Her father and Marceline flee into the garden, but are the only ones to be captured at the gate. In Drancy both are put on transport, it is transport 71. Through the same track, with which he came to France, he and his daughter, packed in freight wagons, drive back to Poland, to Oświęcim, where the Nazis have set up their largest extermination camp. The inhuman heavy labour cannot break her father, knowing that his daughter is waiting for him. But when the Russians approach and the SS men send the surviving men on liquidation mars to Gross Rosen (Rogoźnica), he dies, one of the 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz. Marceline, who shares a barrack with Simone Veil (among others), the later president of the European Parliament, survives the horrors. The feature film she records in 2002 in the camp is entitled The Little Birch Field (Le petit prairie aux bouleaux), the translation of Birkenau. The lead actress returns to the camp for the first time after 57 years. Her name is Myriam. The traveling shot in the middle part of this film, where barrack after barracks are shown in complete silence, leaves a lasting impression. Marceline was imprisoned in barrack 27B, sometimes with ten women on one wooden board. The terrible smell of burned flesh penetrated everything. Despite the horrors that are unimaginable and impossible to visualize, Marceline wants to show with her film that she also experienced love, humanity and solidarity in the camp. And that memories are fleeting. She can no longer find the spot where the corpses of the gas chambers were thrown by trappings and is desperate with wet clay in her hand. “Now I have ashes of my camp mates in my hands,” she thinks.

Liberated
Via Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt and Leipzig she returns to France after the liberation, where chaotic times are waiting for her. Only a handful of the fifty family members who were arrested return. "The destruction of this family ... a mother who was not very strong, with her five children ... who has been remarried to someone who has ruined her ... my sister and brother who committed suicide, to the loss of father as well. I struggled as hard as I could to get out of it. With the resources that were in my range. That's all." Her environment is exposed to sudden plots of mood swings and bossiness. If she needs an enemy, she always knows where to find it, even if it is unreasonable. "I have my white and my black days," she explains.
To give her life more firmness she marries a man whose name Loridan she keeps after the quick divorce. She has jobs here and there, especially as a survey, but she dreams of a film career. In the summer of 1960 she can combine both, if she acts as a questionnaire in the pioneering documentary Chronique d'un été by filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin. On the street she asks, in the spirit of the young generation, disarmingly and directly, to random passers-by: "Are you happy?", "What are you doing with your life?" On a terrace she explains to African immigrants where the number on her arm comes from. They have no idea, a phone number, coquetry? Current issues such as Algeria and Congo are discussed, as well as disappointments in love. With this documentary, recorded with a 16 mm. hand-held camera and with synchronous sound, a new movement called cinéma vérité begins. This style goes back to the avant-garde filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens, who filmed in the streets with small hand-held cameras without a tripod in the 1920s without using actors. In addition to Marceline, Régis Debray and Jean-Pierre Sergent play an important role. She is not only an actress, but also assists Rouch and Morin with the direction. At the Cannes Film Festival, the film won the International Critique Award and scores high as one of the most important documentaries of the 20th century.

An independent spirit
From 1954, she had plunged into politics, initially as a member of the Communist Party in France. After the revelations of Khrushchev she leaves the Stalinist party disillusioned. Her sympathy lies with the struggle for independence of the Algerians, who want to expel the French colonizer. She is a supporter in the clandestine struggle of the liberation front FLN. In her house, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre gives his support. Her first film from 1963 Algérie année zero was recorded on the spot in the first year of independence. She makes it together with Jean-Pierre Sergent, her beloved in those years. This film would only premiere 45 years later in the uncensored version.
In the same year she finds a new lover in the person of Joris Ivens, who at that time is 65 years old, thirty years older than herself. Ivens always said that he fell in love with her on the film screen when he saw her in Chronique d'un été. And vice versa, when Marceline saw Ivens' film ... Á Valparaiso. In the same film lab where she worked on her Algerian film, she realized that Ivens' film was the kind of documentary that she would like to make. Shortly afterwards they meet each other at an exhibition about Cuba, they really seemed to get on with each other. Ivens sent her the next day a large bunch of flowers, in the apartment where she lived at the time: Rue des Saints-Pères. He moved in with her around the turn of the year 1964-65.
This new love from Ivens, while he was still married to his third wife, the Polish poet Ewa Fiszer, finds its first impact in the film Pour le Mistral, about the wind in the South of France. Students play a Romeo-and-Julia-like scene in it, dancing in the wind. He picks up a rose for her. The daily telephone conversations with her during the recordings are the highlights of his day, according to Ivens' notes. They write each other hundreds of love letters during their decades-long relationship, (which lasts until Ivens' death in 1989). But their relationship is not simple. "Because I often put issues up for discussion again. I was not afraid to question things. I am not someone who just accepts something, but someone who asks a lot of questions about things. And at the same time I am an ambivalent person, I am acting for and against. A life that splits. But together we come out, Joris and I, and take a stand. We agreed not to hurt each other unnecessarily. And above all, dare to take risks." Joris Ivens explained and justified her sometimes unreasonable behaviour with reference to her past in the concentration camps.
Her brother once made a connection between her father and Joris Ivens. The Dutch filmmaker became for her a substitute father figure, and she wanted to give everything for him, she herself admitted later. "I would rather live with my father than with a man. Do you understand? I would do anything to see my father again, you know ... My greatest sadness was the loss of my father."

At the war front in Vietnam
In the autumn of 1965, they began carefully to work together during the shooting of Rotterdam Europoort. She is a recording assistant, but does not understand the Dutch. Three years later, however, the cooperation is intense and complete in Vietnam. Initially, she does not get permission from the North Vietnamese authorities to travel with Joris Ivens to the 17th parallel, bombed by the Americans, the demarcation zone between North and South Vietnam. Even from President Ho Chi Minh she gets no permission. Until, during a personal interview with the couple, he sees the number on her forearm and asks what camp she has been in. When he is told that she has survived Auschwitz, he allows her to travel to Vinh-Linh with Joris Ivens. On the way she gets hurt and has to go to the hospital, but eventually they arrive in the village. For two months they live together with the villagers meters underground. 'We complemented each other perfectly. Joris, child of the period of the silent film, master of the image, and I, formed by the sixties, the period of the new synchro-sound. I learned everything from him. We formed a kind of Hydra, with two heads and made twenty films together. In order to pay and release the film, they jointly set up their production company CAPI FILMS in 1967, named after the initials of Ivens' father Cornelis Adrianus Petrus Ivens and also the name of his photo trade.
About her experiences during the recordings of the 17th parallel they keep a diary that is published under the title 17th parallele, la guerre du peuple. Deux mois sous la terre.

To move mountains
After the Vietnam film they produced a documentary about the people's war in Laos and 12 films about the cultural revolution in China. Prime Minister Zhoe Enlai invites Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan personally at the moment when isolated China opens their doors to the West for the first time. In France, in the winter of 1972-73, she travels around town and country to write down questions from citizens, "What do you want from China?" With around 250 questions she and her husband travel through China for three years. They go to places where no westerner had been before. As a questionnaire she again asks random Chinese questions about everyday life. Just like in Chronique d'un été, she holds the microphone, the hand-held camera is used and she looks in the camera from time to time. More than any filmmaker in those days, they get human answers. The twelve-hour epic about the cultural revolution Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (How Yukong turned the mountains) premieres in 1976 and is seen by 250 million people and appreciated. But soon it appears outdated by history. Even the political leadership of China condemns the cultural revolution.
'What do people think of this film nowadays? That is hard to say, the sudden reversals in history are mind-boggling. But this film is a page in the history of China. Some say that this series is a monument. According to Joris and me it is a monster, a craziness', she judges herself in 1982. If they both return to China, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong are deceased. The new leader, Den Xiao Ping, governs the country in a very different way. The confrontation with stories of old friends about their imprisonment and re-education are emotional. One of them, Xi Xian, writes that  Ivens got tears in his eyes when they met each other again and when he saw that the Chinese was handicapped and had to walk with a cane. The dissident writer Bai Hua has the same experience. He first gets to know Ivens in the early 1980s and he feels the tragedy and struggle in Ivens when it comes to the Yukong series. When Bai Hua experiences captivity and censorship himself, Ivens decides to openly help him in his fight for free expression in China, just as he also supports oppressed artists in other countries. For Marceline Loridan-Ivens the shock is even more painful, as survivor of Auschwitz she feels solidarity with victims of totalitarian regimes. "Three years ago there was a retrospective with all twelve parts of Yukong. I turned green, just wanted to be dead. That I believed all that, what is said in those films! Apart from the fact that De apotheker remains a beautiful film in itself, I later understood that it was a film by two Westerners who filmed the dream, which afterwards turned out to be a utopia, that people can change, that there is something good within people. It was hardly conceivable that those Chinese were lying ... It may be that the regime has used us. However, we have always filmed people and during the filming you believe in those people. That is something of innocence, but in that innocence we may have deceived people."

Depression and creative reaction
The recognition that they were wrong with the film plunges the two filmmakers into years of depression. The inner struggle becomes clear in Ivens' second autobiography, which he starts five years after the premiere of Yukong. In this, he distances himself from communism: "The facts are hard, unbearably harsh at times, and even more hard for people like me who have devoted their lives to the struggle for socialism and the revolution."
After 15 years of making militant films, Marceline says that politics has frozen her inside. She explains that she projected completely outwards, in activities, in militantism, with May '68, and everything that came with it. It means no longer thinking about yourself, 'vivre sur des fashions d'ordres imbéciles'.

The answer to their crisis is a new film about China, about the love of both filmmakers for its culture and history, for nature and its inhabitants. Another attempt to bridge the gap between two worlds, East and West, no longer through politics, but through imagination. Originally, the plan was to make two separate films: one in the style of and by Ivens and one by Marceline Loridan-Ivens about making a film by her old husband. But in practice it becomes one integral film, also because she has to take over the management entirely after Ivens has a near-death experience twice and has to stop temporarily. The scene in the factory hall is her own, and the surprising effect of the three-thousand-year-old stone army that suddenly comes to life under the direction of Ivens would be her idea. Inspired by the figure of the Golem in the Jewish story of Prague.
Une histoire de vent (A tale of the Wind, 1988) is a film fairy tale and film testament, both a return to the avant-garde of Ivens and a preview of the 21st century. It has a hybrid form with fiction and documentary elements, with which the filming couple enters a 'no man's land' in film art. Less than a year after the premiere of this award-winning film, her husband dies. It throws Loridan-Ivens back into a years-long crisis, physically and mentally. The death of Ivens makes it possible to return to her Jewish identity and focus on her own history. For years she has been working on a feature film about her stay in the camp, initially with Jeanne Moreau, who is only two months older than she is. But in the end she chooses the Jewish actress Anouk Aimée. Marceline Loridan-Ivens is the first filmmaker who gets permission to film within the camp, something even Steven Spielberg had not been able to for the recordings of Schindler's List. In the film she traverses the word 'museum' on the tourist sign 'Auschwitz Museum'. The small birch field (Le petit prairie aux bouleaux) premieres in 2003 during the Berlinale and wins several prizes.
Undoubtedly she wanted to prove herself as an independent filmmaker with this feature film, without leaning on the help and reputation of her husband. She succeeds partly in that. It is an enormous achievement to film such an emotional subject at the age of 75 in a digital era that is completely different from her previous film experiences and a film genre, which she hardly has any experience with. The intimate film demands a lot from the audience, which has to fill the silences and images of emptiness itself. Those who are willing and able to do so have a special film experience. In essence, the film is also an act of mercy, a mitzvah.
In 2010 her autobiography Ma vie balagan appears, in which she works together with the writer Elisabeth D. Inandiak, just like with Une histoire de vent and Le petit prairie aux bouleaux. The title refers to her chaotic life, and she writes openly and spared no one. Despite the requests of close relatives, she reveals embarrassing private affairs of other people without much empathy. These people suffer emotional damage.
She wants nothing to do with rules, status and is looking for the adventure that lies around the corner of the street. 'Because everything can happen, coincidence, the miracles of encounters can give you exceptional gifts. It is also the opportunities that come along. And do not have fear. Control your fear. Everyone is afraid, me too. But you have to control your fear."
"I was in the lead; Joris dared less. I really don't care about authority. I have never been a conformist, but always in motion. In the camp we had a word for it, namely: 'organize'. We 'organized' things when we stole something, we did not ‘steal’". "It is strange, because I have always been afraid of those in power. In confrontation with them I am simultaneously timid and with a lot of 'gotspe'; not afraid and yet again I am. This is a symbolic image that I want to give here: always function as when in camp.'
In 2015 a follow-up to her biography appears with a long letter to her murdered father ‘Et tu n'es pas revenu'. "You will return Marceline, because you are young," her father had told her during the deportation, of which he did not return. At the end of her life she concludes: "I lived because you wanted me to live." In the year she turned ninety she published a book about love 'L'amour après' with quotes from love letters by Georges Perec, Jan Pierre Sergent and Joris Ivens.

In 1990, a year after the death of her husband, she founded the European Foundation Joris Ivens with the aim of executing her husband's wish: an independent foundation that collects all materials about his life and work. In 1994 she receives financial support from the Dutch State Secretary for Culture, Hedy d'Ancona. She would become the chairman herself, supplemented with board members from her French circle of friends and some Dutch people, including the National Archivist, as representative of the Dutch ministry. Gradually, her position as chairman becomes more problematic through the mixing of private and public interest, until it becomes untenable. When she claims a completely unreasonably high sum in 2010 for the Joris Ivens DVD box, which the Ivens Foundation made after it was commissioned by her, she does not return as chairman and the roads separate.

Biography

Marceline Loridan-Ivens, born Rozenberg

1928 March 19, born in Épinal (Vosges, France).
Her parents are Jewish entrepreneurs, originally from the ghetto of the Polish town of Łódź. They emigrate to France in 1919 because of the anti-Semitic pursuits. They get 5 children.
1928-'39 Her youth alternates between Nancy and Épinal. Elementary School.
1939-1940 First class lyceum.
1940 Germans occupy France
Exodus of the family to the south, into the so-called 'free' zone.
1940 - 1943 The family settles in the village of Bollène in the Vaucluse.
Training at the College of the Jeunes Filles d'Orange (Vaucluse) and in Montémillar (Drôme). During this period the family is in the resistance.
1944 Is arrested together with her father by the French police and Gestapo of Avignon.
Captivity in Avignon, then in Grandes Baumettes in Marseilles.
Collected in Drancy near Paris for deportation to concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland). Captive in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt.
1945 Returns to France in July.
1946-1959 Chaotic and difficult existence in the post-war years, with several
jobs, like doing survey for publicity campaigns. By often visiting the Cinémathèque Française, she hopes to be able to find work in the movie world.
1959-1960 Start of film career: she plays herself as a questionnaire, in the film Chronique d'un été by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, asking people on the street:
'are you happy?' Besides being the most important actress of this innovative film in cinéma vérité style she also assist the directors. The film achieves the International Prize
of the Criticism of the Cannes Film Festival in 1960.
1960-1964 Television Journalist for French television for broadcasts like Nous les Jeunes, Zoom, 16 millions the jeunes.
1962 Directs the documentary Algérie année zéro, recorded in Algeria, together with Jean-Pierre Sergent.
1963 Back in Paris first meeting with Joris Ivens.
1964 Writes a scenario for a fiction film about the post-war years. Due to the death of actor Zbigniev Cybulsky, the film project stops.
1965 Recording assistant of Joris Ivens' Rotterdam Europoort, start of collaboration.
1965-1966 Works together with Ivens on Le ciel, la terre on the Vietnam War.
1967 Deepening the collaboration with Joris Ivens. Co-director of the film Le 17th parallèle. Together with Ivens, set up its own production company CAPI-Films to remain independent entirely . CAPI-Films produces between 1968 and 1971 number of films about the student movement of '68, as well as a re-release of the film Le soulèvement de la vie de Maurice Clavel by Joris Ivens, who was forbidden by the French television. Writes book '17th parallèle, la guerre du peuple. Deux mois sous la terre' and many articles about the Vietnam War.
1968 Co-director with Joris Ivens and collective of Le peuple et ses fusils in Laos, production: CAPI-Films.
1971-1976 Co-director with Joris Ivens of 12-part film series of 12 films about the Cultural Revolution in China: Comment Yukong deplaça les montagnes. Production: CAPI Films.
1976-1980 Many activities for distribution of this series in 17 countries.
1977 Co-director with Ivens for Les Kazaks - minorité nationale and Les Ouigours- minorité nationale.
1980-1983 Writes a script for a film about the city of Florence, commissioned by the board of the Tuscany region. Due to financial and organizational chaos in the government, the project stops.
1984-1985 Research for a film about the cultural history and philosophy of China in relation to the wind.
1985-1988 Co-scenario with Ivens and Elisabeth D. Inandiak of the film Une histoire de vent. Production CAPI - Films. Recordings in China, the Netherlands and France
The film wins, among other things, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Prix National du Cinéma Française, Grand Prix du Cinéma Français à Florence.,
Price of the International Criticism of Moscow Festival, 1st Prize Festival of Sao Paulo, Special Prize of the Jury of the Prix de l'Europe (Felix), Prize
from the press Festival Chalon-sur-Saône. Works on distribution and foreign versions, including German, English, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch etc.
1989 On June 28, her husband Joris Ivens dies in Paris.
1990 On September 17, the European Foundation Joris Ivens in the Netherlands is founded, which brings together all collections around Ivens and the 'Association of Amis de Joris Ivens' in France.
1994-1995 Participation in many commemorations of the liberation of the camps, radio and television interviews.
Works on film scenario about the memory of camp La petite prairie aux bouleaux.
1992 Actress in Golem l'esprit de l'exil (directed by Amos Gitaj)
1999 Actress in Peut-être (directed by Cédric Klapsich)
2002-2003 Directed the feature film La petite prairie aux bouleaux, with Anouk Aimée, after Jeanne Moreau dropped out. Premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale. The film receives the Bernhard Wicki Prize 'Die Brücke', the Peace Prize for German Film at the Munich Film Festival.
Publishes Oswiecim-Brzezinka, a photo book by Andreas Magdanze, written by Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Gerhard Schönberner.
2008 Actress in La fabrique des sentiments (Jean-Marc Moutout)
Actress in Les bureaux de Dieu (Claire Simon)
Publication of autobiography Ma vie Balagan, written by Marceline Loridan-Ivens in collaboration with Élisabeth D. Inandiak
Presentation of DVD box with 20 films by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, produced by the European Foundation Joris Ivens in Nijmegen.
Presentation in Nijmegen (LUX) and at IDFA / Filmmuseum Amsterdam.
2009 Presentation of the French DVD box with 20 films by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan-Ivens in Paris, with retrospective of the films of Joris Ivens and
Marceline Loridan-Ivens in the Cinémathèque Française.
Presentation of the German DVD box during the DOKS International Film festival in Leipzig.
2010 Appointed as commander in the order of the Légion d'honneur
2014 In the television film Le loi (Christian Faure) about the abortion legislation of 1974 from 'Le loi Veil' (named after the minister of health Simone Veil) the role of Marceline Loridan-Ivens is covered by Aurélai Petit.
Presentation at the Cannes Film Festival of the DVD box with all films from
Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (edition CNC).

Filmography Marceline Loridan-Ivens

1960 Chronique d'un été (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch), actress and assistant.
1964 Nous les Jeunes, Zoom, 16 millions the jeunes (television series)
1962 Algérie année zéro, directing with Jean-Pierre Sergent
1965 Rotterdam-Europoort, recording assistance with Joris Ivens' film
1967 Le 17e parallèle, sound and co-directing with Joris Ivens. producer on behalf of Capi-
Films)
1968 Le peuple et ses fusils, co-directed with Joris Ivens and collective
1976 Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes, sound and co-directed with Joris Ivens,
producer on behalf of Capi-Films
- Autour de pétrole: Taking
- La Pharmacie no. 3: Shangai
- L'Usine de géneedurs
- Une Femme, une Famille
- Le Village de Pêcheurs
- Une Caserne
- Impressions d'une Ville: Shanghai
- Histoire d'un balloon, le Lycée no. 13 à Pékin
- Le professeur Tsien
- Une répetition à l'Opéra de Pékin
- Entrainement au Cirque de Pékin
- Les Artisans
1977 Les Kazaks - minorité nationale
1977 Les Ouigours- minorité nationale
1988 Une histoire de vent, co-script with Joris Ivens and Elisabeth D., co-directed with
Joris Ivens, producer on behalf of Capi-Films)
1992 Golem l'esprit de l'exil (directed by Amos Gitaj), actress
1999 Peut-être (director Cédric Klapsich), actress
2003 La petite prairie aux bouleaux, direction and co-scenario with Elisabeth D.
2008 La fabrique des sentiments (Jean-Marc Moutout), actress
Les bureaux de Dieu (Claire Simon), actress

Prices (selection):

1960 Prize of Film Criticism at the Cannes International Film Festival
Chronique d'un été.
1977 César for the best short film for Une histoire de ballon, lycée n ° 31 Pékin
1988 The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Prix National du Cinéma
Française, Grand Prix du Cinéma Français à Florence, Price of the Interna-
National Criticism of the Moscow Festival, 1st Prize Festival of Sao Paulo,
Special Prize of the Jury of the Prix de l'Europe (Felix), Price of the press
Festival Chalon-sur-Saône for Une histoire de vent (The story of the wind). 2003 Bernhard Wicki Prize 'Die Brücke', the Peace Prize of the German film on it
Munich Film Festival for La petite prairie aux bouleaux.
2010 Promoted as Officer of the Légion d'honneur (she was previously appointed
as a knight of the Légion d'honneur)