In this interview with Dominique Noguez, Marguerite Duras talks successively about each of her four short films made in 1979: Césarée, Les Mains négatives, Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne), Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver). She touches briefly on the various subjects dealt with: the return to Césarée of Berenice, repudiated for reasons of state, Jewish wandering, the scandal of the camps in the two Aurelia Steiner. Negative Hands as the colonial data of humanity, a film offered to the blacks and Portuguese who clean up Paris before leaving the place. Marguerite Duras also comments, with excerpts, on the various traveling shots that make up the main plot of each of the short films. And the documentary ends with a few words of epilogue: a real pamphlet by Marguerite Duras against dreams, significantly entitled Work and Words.

A documentary about filmmaker Marguerite Duras.

Conversation between a woman (Duras) and a man (D. Noguez) about a woman and a man.

Ernesto, a seven-year-old boy who has the body of a thirty-year-old man, decides, upon attending his first day of school, that he no longer wishes to attend, because he does not wish to be taught matters that he does not know.

Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of a French diplomat in 1930s India, takes many lovers to relieve the boredom in her life.

This afterword to India Song (Duras' celebrated 1975 film) is organized in several parts. It begins with an interview to Marguerite Duras by Dominique Noguez, an expert in her work; the interview links the film to the two movies whom it's related to: The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul. Several themes are tackled: childhood, autobiographical traces, relationships between differents characters and different films and more. India Song's main actors — Delphine Seyrig and Michael Lonsdale, who played Anne-Marie Stretter and the French vice-consul — join the conversation and talk about their roles and their craft. Marguerite Duras then evokes her memories of the shooting with the composer Carlos D'Alessio and her camera operato Bruno Nuytten. The conversations are punctuated by clips of the film.

In an empty villa, Vera Baxter sits and contemplates her life, as she recounts to a woman who was drawn to the villa when she heard the name Vera Baxter pronounced. Vera tells her about her no-good husband, who has been using her to keep his failing business afloat, up to her present love affair.

A man returns to the place he once lived a passionate love affair with a woman who is now dead. So powerful are the emotions that seize him that he imagines she is still alive, and begins to live as if this were the case...