In Summer Hours, a French family decides to sell off a country house and most of its contents.

The valuable paintings and furniture go to a museum.

It's a simple enough family story that connects the material and the emotional, but a story with a broader meaning about France itself and the passage of time.

For filmmaker Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours also has personal meaning.

When he was in Toronto to introduce the movie during the film festival, Assayas, 54, mentioned that he made the film a few months after the death of his mother.

"So I was sharing a lot of the emotions of the characters while I was making the film," says Assayas.

"It's a very universal subject. And it's not my family or my house.

"But it's obvious that it's pretty personal in parts."

And how.

Like the matriarch in Summer Hours who carefully preserves the artistic legacy of her late uncle, Assayas' mother likewise kept alive the work and the memory of her late father, a respected painter.

And like the adult children in Summer Hours, Assayas realized that he wouldn't be able to carry on his mother's work.

"This is very much about emotion, but the whole film came out of the arc of the objects," says the filmmaker.

"I had the story of the objects before I had the story of the individuals. What I wanted to show is that art is born from life, man, nature, light, and somehow lives in its own natural environment, in which it's born -- and then somehow ends up in captivity, in a museum, a zoo for objects."

To illustrate, Assayas has two valuable vases end up in very different places in the film.

"I wanted a parallel for the vases." he says. "One ends up in a zoo, and the other continues being a vase, leading a happy life with someone who cares about it, who was never concerned about the value of it. She just loved the vases and thought they were convenient. She thinks they have no value."

He smiles. "And flowers look so good in them."

Best-known here for such films as Irma Vep or the more recent Clean, Demonlover and Boarding Gate, Assayas (who was briefly married to his Clean star, Maggie Cheung) presents a gentler world in Summer Hours.

Still, the theme of coping with the huge shifts available in contemporary life is certainly present. Assayas has been pleasantly surprised by the mainstream success of Summer Hours, and by the conversations that he has when he introduces the film outside the cities.

"That has been an interesting experience for me, because I realized I had a broader demographic," he says.

"In provincial towns and places like that, people really wanted to discuss the issues in the film -- not modern filmmaking. They wanted to talk about how society is changing, the tensions within society reflected in a family, how they are disoriented by the way things are taken for granted."

He says, "It's a delicate subject. Something everyone feels, and has his or her own take on.

"I tried to see the film through the eyes of every character, and give them their good reasons."

Assayas adds, "Movies are not about making statements, but about raising the questions.

"You can only do that if you somehow expose the complexities of the issue."

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