André Téchiné was born on 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen, a small town in the Midi-Pyrénées region, department of Tarn-et-Garonne, France. His family, of Spanish ancestry, owned a small agricultural equipment business. He grew up in the southwest French countryside and in his adolescence acquired a passion for film. From 1952 to 1959 he went to a Catholic boarding school in Montauban. He was allowed to leave only on Sunday afternoons, when he would go to the cinema, although he often had to return before the screening ended. In 1959 he transferred to a secular state school, which exposed him to a different culture, with Marxist teachers, a film club and a film magazine, "La Plume et l'écran", to which he contributed. "Films were my only opening to the world," Téchiné has said. "They were my only possibility of escaping my family environment and my boarding school. It was probably dangerous because, through movies, I learned how the world works and how human relations work. But it was magical, and I was determined to follow the thread of that magic."