Director Michel Gondry spoke a viewing of his documentary L'épine dans le coeur ( The Thorn in the Heart ) at MIT on January 15, 2010 . The thread of the story follows the eight schools and sites in rural France where Aunt Suzette taught children from 1952 to 1986. Aunt Suzette comes from a generation in France who saw teaching children as a duty. As both mother and teacher to her son Jean-Yves, she had some family struggles. In one scene, she calls her son a thorn in her heart. “My auntie getting older, so many experiences to tell, I would fail her to not record them. The village where she lived all her life, it’s a place people don’t talk about it. Everybody knew the story but had never talked about it,” said Michel Gondry.