NUIT journal · English translation
They loved before us.
Three documentaries bring older histories into the conversation about relationships and identity. We want to keep a place for them at NUIT.
French original: 22 October 2026
When we put together a selection about intimate life, one question deserves to stay open: whose lives are we making visible? We want to include stories that take time to look back over several decades. Choices in love can then be told with their detours, silences and what they became.
Lives told in retrospect
In Les Invisibles, Sébastien Lifshitz gives gay women and men born between the two world wars space to speak. They look back on lives lived in a society that rejected them. The film offers several experiences, with their choices and differences.
Chris Bolan’s A Secret Love follows two women who concealed their relationship for a long time. Coming out late in life becomes a concrete question at the scale of one couple. Together, the films offer two beginnings for thinking about visibility and time.
A refuge leaves traces
Casa Susanna moves the focus to a house in the Catskills in 1950s and 1960s America. Archives and testimony trace a community whose members could express their feminine identity away from public scrutiny. A particular place gives shape to experiences otherwise easily compressed into a few words.
These histories belong to different contexts. A long-concealed relationship and the life of a community are distinct. We bring them together because they offer different approaches to identity, relationships and the possibility of being visible.
The place we want to make
At NUIT, these works should remain easy to find alongside books and podcasts. Their presence draws attention to the span of the lives being told and to the diversity of experiences. That is an editorial choice.
As you start, ask what you want to encounter: the history of a couple, several life stories or a place’s archives? The three profiles below can help you choose. Our article about life after coming out continues the conversation.
Works and sources
- Les Invisibles · Sébastien Lifshitz · Official source
- A Secret Love · Chris Bolan · Official source
- Casa Susanna · Sébastien Lifshitz · Official source
Presentations draw on official information about the works. This article expresses an editorial intention; it is not a review based on watching the films in full.