Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Starring Agnès Varda, Sandrine Bonnaire and Hervé Chandès
Running time: 1 hour and 55 minutes

by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy

I’d seen clips of this mini-series-turned-film when I wrote my piece on Vagabond for our print issue a while back. I was watching to get some background of her process while making the film but was taken by how the clips were, not only, moving and informational, but also beautiful to look at. I watched the film in its entirety at TIFF this year and, if you’re in the Philly area, you can see it this Sunday, the 20th at 12:15 PM at the Ritz East. I was glad to see that her discussions about the rest of her career were as in depth and artful.

I think it’s important to note that I’ve barely seen anything else by Agnès Varda, but this movie is still extremely engaging and informative. The viewer certainly doesn't need to have a deep familiarity with her work to appreciate this on its own. She spent time revisiting the locations, speaking with her actors and collaborators and ruminating over her thoughts going in and the lessons she took away from each of her projects she discussed.

One would assume that a filmmaker would gloss over their mistakes and highlight their accomplishments when looking back on their career, but Varda eagerly discussed the lows alongside the highs that came out of them. This is a seminar for filmmakers to come as well as a diary and memoir of her thoughts in the last few years of her life.

However, the biggest piece of knowledge I came away from this film with was that I need to go through and watch as much of her filmography as I can. The glimpses that you see of them here, and the loving care that she has in describing them and their making, make every shot she made feels precious.

While discussing my fondness of this film with fellow Philly film writers Ryan Silberstein and Garrett Smith of Cinema Seventy-Six, they quoted someone as describing Varda as a Miyazaki witch in both appearance and persona. After watching Varda by Agnès, I could not agree more. This is both a hilarious and precise description that I think Varda herself would get a chuckle out of.

As I mentioned at the top, this is playing this weekend at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Do yourself a favor and have a beautiful afternoon with this smart, sweet, funny woman that was one of the greatest filmmakers that we will ever had the pleasure to learn from.