This article presents a refl ection on the formation of the literary reader, with a reading of the fi lm Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, 2002, France/China, 111 minutes, directed by Dai Sijie with screenplay by Dai Sijie and Nadine Perront), based on concepts developed in the work of Roger Chartier. Studying reading as a concrete act, through the prism of the Cultural History of Reading, Chartier considers the empirical readers and practices that organize access to and contact with the texts in a given group. The formation of the reader and his/her representations and practices of reading are linked to the rules, values and beliefs of the community of readers to which he/she belongs. In the context of the fi lm, three young Chinese people form a community of readers, avoiding the reading prohibitions imposed by the Maoist government. This work seeks to understand the formation of the seamstress, the protagonist of the fi lm, as a reader of literature, based on her experiences of reading in the “community of the three friends”