4:00PM

LA POINTE COURTE

Director: Agnès Varda

Year: 1956

Country: France

Language: French / English Subtitles

Run Time: 1hr 20min

Post-screening conversation with Agnès Varda’s daughter, filmmaker Rosalie Varda, and Ava DuVernay at 5:30PM.

The great Agnès Varda's film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complicated relationship between a married couple and a documentary-like look at the daily struggles of the locals, Varda's discursive, gorgeously filmed debut was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the coming French New Wave.

6:30PM

VARDA BY AGNÈS

Director: Agnès Varda

Year: 2019

Country: France

Language: French / English Subtitles

Run Time: 1hr 55min

Los Angeles Premiere.

Pre- screening conversation with Agnès Varda’s daughter, filmmaker Rosalie Varda, and Ava DuVernay at 5:30PM.

The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, she acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—this wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.

About the Filmmaker:

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. Born in Belgium, Varda spent her teenage years in Sète then moved to Paris where she studied at the École du Louvre and took evening classes in photography at the École de Vaugirard. Agnès Varda became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon theater 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 home. That same year, Agnès Varda made the move to cinema without any formal training. She founded Ciné Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte. She has since directed short films and features, both fiction and documentaries, including award-winning 2017 film Faces Places in collaboration with photographer/muralist J.R. In 2003, she began her third career as a visual artist at the Venice Biennale. Agnès Varda was married to filmmaker Jacques Demy and together they raised Rosalie Varda-Demy, costume designer and producer, and Mathieu Demy, actor and filmmaker.

About Rosalie Varda:

Rosalie Varda is a French costume designer, producer, writer and actress. She is perhaps best known for producing the documentary Faces Places, directed by and starring her mother, Agnès Varda, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018.