Marcel Pagnol: My Father's Glory, My Mother's Castle

Based on the bestselling memoirs of French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (the acclaimed author of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring), MY FATHER’S GLORY and its sequel MY MOTHER’S CASTLE recount the nostalgic memories of Pagnol’s youth growing up in Provence at the turn of the twentieth century. During one idyllic summer, 11-year-old Marcel (Julien Ciamaca) discovers friendship and wonder amid the rocky peaks surrounding his family’s countryside home while learning new respect for his gentle and caring schoolmaster father Joseph (Philippe Caubère). Upon his return to Marseilles, Marcel longs to escape back to his beloved hills and is granted his wish when his adoring mother Augustine (Nathalie Roussel) devises a plan that allows them to visit the cottage more frequently.

ABOUT MARCEL PAGNOL
“In Marseille, I am still a child, in Paris, I am old..." Marcel Pagnol was born in Aubagne, at 16 cours Barthélémy, a few kilometers from Marseille where he soon moved with his parents. He spent his entire childhood and adolescence there and studied at Thiers high school. During the vacations, his father rented, with Uncle Jules, a house in the hills, the famous “Bastide Neuve” beyond the small village of La Treille. Marcel remained a Marseillais at heart.

Appointed teacher in Paris, a few years later, he wrote his first successful plays there. Thus “exiled” in the capital, he found and described Marseille in “MARIUS“. Marcel Pagnol lived in Paris on several occasions. But cinema brought him back to the South of France and to his “dear hills”. As early as the 1930s, he set up his laboratories and then his film studios in Marseille.

In 1941, he wanted to create a Cité du Cinéma in the region and bought the Château de la Buzine. He recognized it as the castle of “fear” that he would later evoke in the second volume of his “Childhood Memories”, “The Castle of my Mother."

He also bought the Étoile estate, in La Gaude, near Cagnes, in order to start “intensive carnation cultivation” in 1941 and to avoid the STO (Servive du Travail Obligatoire) for the technicians of his studios, which were sold to Gaumont. Thereafter, he spent most of his vacations with his family.

At the end of the war, he retired for a while to his property in the Sarthe region, to the Ignières mill, which he sold in the late fifties. In order to shoot “The Beautiful Miller’s Wife” with Jacqueline Pagnol and Tino Rossi, Pagnol acquired an old mill in “La Colle-sur-Loup” in the Nice hinterland. As early as 1926, Marcel fell in love with the Principality of Monaco. In 1951, he decided to settle in Monte-Carlo with his friend Prince Rainier. He bought “La Lestra”, a magnificent 19th century villa located near the bay. Marcel, Jacqueline, Frédéric and Estelle lived there happily until early 1954. “It was the most beautiful time of our life” wrote Pagnol. Then, recalled by the Academy, Pagnol returned to Paris and opened offices on rue Fortuny.

He lived on rue Jean Goujon, and soon acquired a private mansion in the square of avenue Foch. It was there that he lived with Jacqueline for the rest of his life.