Varda by Agnès

Agnès Varda, the amiable “grandmother of the French New Wave,” is as dazzling as ever in this, her swan song. Seated on a theater stage, she talks about her life and career and uses scenes from her rich body of work to shed light on her artistic vision and ideas. In addition to her films, Varda by Agnès explores her photographic work and her later development as an installation artist.

Varda talks about classics from her analogue period, such as her iconic 1954 debut La pointe courte. And when discussing a series of tracking shots that connect various episodes in her minor box office hit Vagabond, she reveals: “I wanted to put in an enigma that only I knew the secret to.” She looks back with equal pleasure on the flop One Hundred and One Nights. In 2000, she started using a digital camera and discovered—in The Gleaners and I—that it allowed her to get even closer to the central subject of all her work: people.