After May (aka Something in the Air) is filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s (Summer Hours, Carlos) lyrical and reflective memoir of his own youthful wavering in the aftermath of the student-led protests that convulsed France in May 1968.
“Deeply absorbing... This is a beautifully crafted work and an acute evocation of its period both in look and attitude.” — David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Screened as part of Autumn Events 2013
After May 2012
Something in the Air
After May (aka Something in the Air) is filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s (Summer Hours, Carlos) lyrical and reflective memoir of his own youthful wavering in the aftermath of the student-led protests that convulsed France in May 1968. Love and desire, the search for meaningful work and the fragmentation of radical politics pull him and his circle this way and that, while a less idealistic era of indiess idealistic era of inviduaka of inviduakl self-realisation edges into place. politics pull him and his circle this way and vidual self-realisation edges into place.
“Olivier Assayas’s After May is a swooning and swirling but always level-headed study of the lives of a small group of suburban Parisian teenagers in the years soon after 1968. An ensemble drama with a pleasingly light touch, it looks back with warmth and candour at the lives of these young people as they confront their beliefs, their loves and their ambitions head-on. So it’s a coming-of-age story for all time in one sense, but the special ideas and idealism of the early 1970s mean that these characters’ horizons are forever expanding and their choices seemingly infinite… It’s a captivating and fresh snapshot of a well-documented time.” — Dave Calhoun, Time Out London