Sinopsis
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. Agnès Varda focuses on her career as a director, offering a personal insight into her creative process, which she calls "cinécriture". Firstly, she elucidates her "analogue period" from 1954 to 2000, in which the director is in the foreground. In the second part, she focuses on the years from 2000 to 2018, and shows how she uses digital technology to look at the world in her own, unique way. Through her Cinema Lessons around the world, this fascinating storyteller offers us an incursion into her universe, and the opportunity for her to continue to sow desires for cinema. Taking the form of a cinema lesson – given at the Fondation Cartier – Varda by Agnès is a journey through the work of the essential figure of the French New Wave.
Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928, growing up with four brothers and sisters. In 1940, her family moved to the south of France to escape the war. Agnès Varda spent her teenage years in Sète She moved to Paris, where she studied at the École du Louvre and took evening photography classes at the École de Vaugirard.
She became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon theatre festival in 1948, then for the Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. She held her first personal exhibition in 1954 in the courtyard of her house.
That same year, Agnès Varda makes the leap to the cinema without any formal training. she founded Ciné Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature film, “La pointe courte”, which told the story of a sad couple and their relationship in a small town. The film was the stylistic precursor of the French "Nouvelle vague" that has earned her the title of "Godmother of the French New Wave". Since then, she directed short and feature films, both fiction and documentaries.
Varda pioneered opening up film directing to women. "I suggested women to study cinema. I told them, 'Get out of the kitchens, out of your homes, get hold of the tools to make movies.'"
Wednesday, October 25th, 2023. 8:30 pm
Sede: Cines Verdi.
Director: Agnès Varda (Belgium)
Genre: Documentary
Country of production: France
Year of production: 2019
Running time: 115’
Language: French with Spanish subtitles
Cast: Agnès Varda, Sandrine Bonnaire, Hervé Chandès, Nurith Aviv
Production: Rosalie Varda
Screenwriter: Agnès Varda
Director of photography: Claire Duguet
Production companies: Ciné-Tamaris, Ciné-Tamaris /co-production), HBB26 (co-production)
International sales: Ciné-Tamaris
Festivals/Awards: Berlinale, out of competition. Selected at the Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival, Special session at the Visions du Réel, Nyon (Swiss), CPH:DOX - Copenhagen international documentary film festival.
