“Spellbinding visual beauty that reminds you of the transporting power of pure cinema, in which images alone convey the ineffable. It attests to the undiminished creativity of a woman who has led a charmed life surrounded by art and artists. An attitude of surreal playfulness informs the visuals.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“Dear Agnès Varda. She is a great director and a beautiful, lovable and wise woman, through and through.
It is not enough that she made some of the first films of the French New Wave. Her greatest triumph is her life itself.
If you have not seen a single film by Agnès Varda, perhaps it is best if you start with THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS.”
– Roger Ebert

"New Wave vet Varda has contrived a wondrous vehicle for recapturing watershed moments, a kind of cine memoir that
filters her past through the many beaches, from Noirmoutier in France to the Pacific in California, that in some way shaped her.”
– Erica Abeel, indieWIRE

“Few filmmakers possess the èlan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory piece
cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective and installation…enough beautiful images to warrant several viewings. A must.”
– Max Goldberg, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Click here to read Liza Bear’s Q&A with Agnes Varda in the June/July 2009 issue of Interview Magazine [pdf file]

Click here to read Michael Musto’s interview with Angès Varda from the Village Voice.

Agnès Varda, whom A.O. Scott in The New York Times deemed “a treasure” when writing about her acclaimed documentary, THE GLEANERS AND I, returns with a movie that synthesizes 50 years of filmmaking, and 80 years of a life well-lived. An early member of the French New Wave, Varda has worked with Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Birkin, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret — not to mention Harrison Ford, the Black Panthers and Viva. Stories of her childhood in Brussels and adolescence in occupied Paris, of Los Angeles in the ’60s, and of life in her 14^e arrondissement Paris neighborhood are melded with clips from both documentary and fiction work. Husband/filmmaker Jacques Demy, who died in 1990, is an abiding presence. Varda is an avid collector: of people and places, sensual experiences and intellectual preoccupations, personal commitments and political principles. She is a mother and wife, a feminist, nature-lover and urban-dwelling artist. Above all, she is a woman in love with the cinema whose new movie perfectly expresses her sentiment, “While I live, I remember.”

• Official website
• Click here to read A.O. Scott’s “Arts & Leisure” profile of Varda from The New York Times

FRANCE • 2008 • 109 MINS. • IN FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • CINEMA GUILD