Last month, the film world lost a giant with the passing of Agnès Varda. With a career spanning seven decades and dozens of features, shorts, and documentaries, Varda produced a vast body of work that influenced and evolved with the cinematic art form. Our program highlights just a handful of films, from her trailblazing days as a key figure in the French New Wave to her introspective late career documentaries. Tonight Varda's meditative autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès (2008).

"I’m playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story." So begins Varda’s gentle and uplifting stroll down memory lane, in which she revisits her career in film, photography, and art, together with the people and the places she loved and filmed. But The Beaches of Agnès is not just a collection of memories. Varda, with her contagious energy at 80 years of age, is still having fun and experimenting with cinema, and so we see her arranging mirrors on a beach, conversing with Chris Marker in the form of a cartoon cat, and talking to us from inside a giant plastic whale. Through a playful and evocative collage of her past, Varda pays a deeply poetic homage to life and cinema. Watch the trailer.

Directed by Agnès Varda, 2008, France, 110 minutes. In French w/ English subtitles. 

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