Sepia cinema in Nicolas Sarkozy’s France: nostalgia and national identity

Abstract The paper examines the wave of nostalgic cinema that reached its peak in France in the 2000s and that some critics have characterised as sepia cinema. The success of Les Choristes/The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004) was followed by a number of films with an old-fashioned flavour such as Le Petit Nicolas/Little Nicholas (LaurentTirard, 2009) or La Nouvelle Guerre des boutons/War of the Buttons (Yann Samuell, 2011). The article aims to understand the memorial dynamics that the sepia wave has assumed in a French society more and more obsessed with its memory and the valorisation of its national past. The author argues that the sepia wave reveals an important change in the frameworks of collective memory. In the context of the repeated failures of the memorial politics enacted by Nicolas Sarkozy, the sepia films tend to mobilise a family memory that appears more efficient than State memory in the sharing of recollections linked to a collective past.