Agnès Varda

Varda insisted she had only seen a handful of films before making her first movie, but both the film critics and her future peers were stunned when they watched one of the most mature and sophisticated debuts in French film history. — A man arrives at a train station to meet his wife. After 4 years of marriage, the couple has problems, but they decide they belong together. When they return to Paris, she is armed with a better understanding of her husband after having visited the area where he grew up. It’s a place of poor and proud people. Fishermen gather shellfish from a bacteria-laden lagoon. A toddler dies from an unidentified disease. A young man is allowed to flirt with a neighbor's daughter after winning a tournament.

Warm colours, Mozart and pastoral calm fill the sunniest film about infidelity ever made, which Agnès Varda shot just before May 1968. Her hero is a man who falls for a second woman and begins to believe he can add a new happiness to his life without losing the first. — A young carpenter has a comfortable, peaceful life, a lovely wife and two wonderful children. He’s happily married, but on a work trip he meets another woman and they begin an affair. His wife can tell something has put him in an unusually good mood, and since he can’t bring himself to lie to her, he tells her the truth. Nothing has changed between them, he promises. — Special Prize of the Jury | Berlin International Film Festival | 1965

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a girl who refuses to belong to any world, in the film that won Agnès Varda the Golden Lion at Venice. It begins with her body being found and then goes back over her last days, and you won’t be able to take your eyes off her. — A reporter we never see turns the camera on the men who found a girl dead, and asks how she got there. Flashbacks show her drifting among homeless people and immigrant labourers, spending time with a professor who studies trees and with a young woman who envies how completely free she is. She once had an office job, and one day she walked out and kept on going. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 1985 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1985 OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985

When Jane Birkin, the famous model and actress, confided to Agnès Varda (“Cléo from 5 to 7”) that turning forty terrified her, Varda answered with a film. The playful portrait that came out of it captures a bond between an actress and a director quite unlike any other. — Jane Birkin sits down in front of the camera without make-up and asks to be filmed as if she were as transparent and anonymous as anyone else, which is the one thing this kaleidoscopic study won’t do. Instead it drops her into a Renaissance portrait, a thriller and a black-and-white comedy, and straps her into Joan of Arc’s armour. Woman, mother, muse, idol: every one of them goes by her name.

Agnès Varda’s feminist film about abortion and freedom follows two friends who fight side by side for the right to decide how they live. It’s the most political film the French New Wave icon ever made, yet it’s as full of her energy and humour as anything she did. — Seventeen-year-old Pauline is still at school in 1962 when, in a Paris gallery, she spots a photograph of an old friend. Suzanne, now twenty-two, has two children by the photographer and needs money for an abortion the law forbids, so Pauline lies to her parents to get it before running away from home to sing. They won’t see each other again for ten years, until they meet at a demonstration in 1972.

The Birkin VS the Varda family, literally. The French director reflects on a taboo subject in an incredibly paradoxical manner and presents her version of what ideal love might be; rather impossible. — At her daughter's party, a mother meets one of the girl’s 14-year-old classmates; he is drunk and she helps him get sober. The woman and the teenager start looking for opportunities to meet, which initially means going to arcades with his favorite game, Kung Fu Master. Gradually, however, the relationship turns romantic and their encounters more and more careless, until her daughter sees them kissing. Where will all this lead? — Official Selection | Berlin International Film Festival | 1988