A poignant work of cinematic memoir, The Beaches of Agnès travels back through Varda’s remarkable life, and like water on the shore, encapsulates the ephemerality of time and memory.

This barbed masterpiece—about a carpenter testing the limits of the domestic bliss he knows with his picture-perfect wife and children, a complement to the crescendoing feminist movement in the mid-’60s—exemplifies Varda at her boldest.

Cinévardaphoto is made up of three short films connected by the theme of photography, the medium that gave Varda her start and spurred the meditations on memory that would define her career.

Both a spirited depiction of Paris in the ’60s and a substantive take on the female psyche, Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the cornerstones of the French New Wave, enduring for its intelligent perspective on the strong, unpredictable emotions that arise when facing one’s mortality.

Varda’s affable, curious portrait of her neighbors and acquaintances on Rue Daguerre, where she’d been living for decades, is at once one of her warmest movies and a slightly embittered reflection on “a woman’s creativity… smothered by the home.”

This docufiction hybrid and self-described “emotion picture,” made during Varda’s second L.A. sojourn as a companion piece to the documentary Mur Murs, is a frank reflection on estrangement, loneliness, and loss. An NYFF19 selection.

At age 88, Agnès Varda teamed up with the 33-year-old visual artist JR for this unassuming, Oscar-nominated masterpiece, a tour of rural France that celebrates artisanal production, workers’ solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality. An NYFF55 selection.

Varda’s wondrous reflection on the art of scavenging is a catalog of subjects candid, unsettling, touching, and sublime, gathered and arranged—as only Varda could—into a curious, coherent whole. An NYFF38 selection.

Deeply humbled by the reception to her compassionate 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, Varda returned to it two years later with this companion piece, in which she reconnects with several of the film’s subjects.

In Jacquot de Nantes, Varda recreates her husband Jacques Demy’s coming-of-age in the west of France, its events taken directly from Demy’s own childhood recollections, written down while he was growing weaker from AIDS-related illness.

Varda casts Jane Birkin in everything from a heist thriller to re-creations of Renaissance portraiture in this complex, kaleidoscopic consideration of the actress as a woman, wife, mother, muse, and icon.

Jane Birkin (who also conceived the story) gives one of her finest performances in Varda’s one-of-a-kind romance. She plays a 40-year-old divorcée who falls in love with her daughter’s 14-year-old classmate—an eyebrow-raising premise that’s treated with surprising tenderness.

This erotic Californian odyssey, in which Warhol superstar Viva enters into a precarious ménage à trois with the writers of the musical Hair, was one of Varda’s boldest, goofiest reckonings with the American counterculture. An NYFF7 selection.

With the murals scattered throughout L.A., Varda found a quietly brilliant way to get an outsider’s perspective on the city’s convoluted social, racial, and economic tensions. An NYFF19 selection.

In this whimsical film historical revue, Varda assembles a troupe of beloved film icons to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Lumière Brothers’ earliest projections.

Varda’s feminist musical—with lyrics by the director—concerns the bond of sisterhood felt by Pomme (Valérie Mairesse) and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard) throughout years of changes and fraught relationships with men. Opening Night of NYFF15.

Varda was 25 when she shot her enormously influential debut feature, a marital drama set in a small coastal fishing village in Sète that many consider the first proper entry in what would become the Nouvelle Vague.

The heroine of one of Varda’s most celebrated features, played in a career-high performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, is a strong-willed young woman for whom freedom is its own costly end.

In her final work, partially constructed of onstage interviews and lectures, interspersed with a wealth of clips and archival footage, Agnès Varda guides us through her career, from her movies to her remarkable still photography to the delightful and creative installation work. An NYFF57 selection.

Varda crafts a living memorial in The World of Jacques Demy: a nonlinear, kaleidoscopic celebration of her husband, a man of inexhaustible creativity who looked at the world with wonder.

Twenty-five years after Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, Varda convenes a one-of-a-kind reunion, in which the film’s cast and crew revisit the town they imbued with a dreamy second life.

These three films from 1958 include Varda’s Along the Coast, a wryly existentialist riff on the travelogue; an impressionistic depiction of pregnancy, Diary of a Pregnant Woman; and a poetic, colorful chronicle of the castles of the Loire Valley, Ô saisons, ô châteaux.

From her silent Keatonesque caper featured in Cléo from 5 to 7 to her 1968 open-air portrait of Oakland’s Black Panthers, this program showcases Varda’s inspired approaches to the short form throughout the ‘60s.

This program combines a selection of Varda’s empathetic, wise, playful, and restlessly curious short films made across three decades, starting with Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex, Varda’s politically frank docu-short made two years before her feminist musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, and concluding with the Méliès-inspired romance Le lion volatil.

This program combines four shorts selected and to be presented in person by Varda’s producer and daughter, Rosalie Varda, including Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Black Panthers, Uncle Yanco, and Women Reply, Our Bodies, Our Sex.

In this vibrant five-part miniseries, Varda travels around the globe for a freewheeling assemblage of people, places, art, and happenings. Each of these deceptively off-the-cuff encounters speaks to Varda’s keen fascination with life’s surprises, questions, and possibilities.

To celebrate the final weekend of our Varda retrospective, we present a conversation with another generation of filmmakers about what Varda has meant to them and the key movies from her oeuvre that influenced them. 

During our Agnès Varda retrospective, taking place December 20-January 6, stop by the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater for a free loop of our Agnès Varda Q&As throughout the last decade. The career-spanning conversations touch on her work in narrative and documentary (and hybrids of the two), film and video, photography and installation works, and more. […]

Highlights include a pop-up installation showcasing pivotal themes, moments, and the progression of Agnès Varda’s work; rare behind-the-scenes photos; archival film trailers and exclusive interviews; an interactive photo space; and more.