Varda by Agnès

Agnès Varda takes a seat on a theatre stage. This professional photographer, installation artist and pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague is an institution of French cinema but a fierce opponent of any kind of institutional thinking. In this film, she offers insights into her oeuvre, using excerpts from her work to illustrate – more associatively than chronologically – her artistic visions and ideas. Her lively, anecdote-rich and clever talk is divided into two sections. Firstly, she elucidates her ‘analogue period’ from 1954 to 2000, in which the director is in the foreground. This was the young woman who set out to reinvent cinema, someone who was always open to chance and to moments of documentary, even in fiction; who, with every new film, changed her narrative style. In the second part, Agnès Varda 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. And started a new life as a visual artist, showing pieces that film goers have never seen. Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Agnès Varda is a visual storyteller who eschews convention and prescribed approaches to drama. Together with some of her fellow travelers, she takes the audience on a journey through her world of unorthodox images.