SYNOPSIS

Four Stars: “A great, loving, uplifting film. If you have not seen a single film by Agnes Varda, perhaps it is best if you start with The Beaches of Agnes.”
– Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Spellbinding visual beauty reminds you of the transporting power of pure cinema. It attests to the undiminished creativity of a woman who has led a charmed life surrounded by art and artists.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times

(Cinema Guild release) A reflection on art, life and the movies, The Beaches of Agnes is a magnificent new film from the great Agnes Varda, director of Cleo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I, a richly cinematic self portrait that touches on everything from the feminist movement and the Black Panthers to the films of husband Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave.

When one thinks of the major figures of postwar cinema, the name Agnès Varda immediately springs to mind. Her body of work in both fiction and documentary is defined by a wealth of innovation and imagination. Irrepressible and enquiring, she is a force of nature, and even at eighty shows no signs of slowing down. Her new film is a reminder that there are few artists capable of such eloquence in cinema.

Varda takes beaches as her point of departure. Though she was not born near the ocean, she would travel to the seaside every Easter and summer during her childhood, and her memories of these trips act as a springboard for the film's meditation on her early life. She recalls her wartime exile to the coastal village of Sète as a period of endless fun and life jackets. While a young adult, Varda began her career as a photographer before raising a family with her husband, Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and eventually turning to filmmaking. Returning to Sète over a decade after the end of the war, she used the locale and its fishermen as the backdrop for her remarkable first feature film, La Pointe Courte.

Varda weaves photographs, vintage footage, film clips, and present-day sequences into a memorable voyage through her life, during which she confronts the joy of creation and the pain of personal loss, death and aging. It is a singular trip played out against the exciting context of the postwar explosion of cultural expression in France. She knew everyone: her colleagues in the French New Wave, the Black Panthers in California and even Jim Morrison, who would visit when in Paris. Idiosyncratic, engaging and deeply moving, The Beaches of Agnes is a journey through an extraordinary artistic life

FESTIVAL HISTORY

• Winner, Best Documentary, César Awards, 2009
• Winner, Best Film, French Critics Union, 2009
• Official Selection, Toronto Int'l Film Festival, 2008
• Official Selection, Venice Film Festival, 2008

DIRECTOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Agnès Varda has been called the "Grandmother of the New Wave," a well-meaning if curious tribute for a woman who directed her first feature film at the age of 26. Born in Brussels to a French father and Greek mother, Varda studied literature and psychology at the Sorbonne, and art history at the École du Louvre. She'd originally wanted to be a museum curator, but a night-school course in photography changed her mind. Rapidly establishing herself as a top-rank still photographer, Varda became the official cameraperson for the Theatre Festival of Avignon and the Theatre National Populaire, and then pursued a career as a photojournalist.

Encouraged by filmmaker Alain Resnais, Varda made her movie directorial bow in 1955 with La Pointe Courte. She based the film on a William Faulkner short story, to which she was attracted because of its parallel plotlines (a recurring device in her later films). That same year, she accompanied another future New Wave director, Chris Marker, to China as visual advisor for Marker's Dimanche a Pekin, then concentrated on writing and directing experimental short subjects for the next five years. Varda's international reputation was secured with her 1961 feature Cleo de 5 a 7, which related in "real time" the anguish of a pop singer awaiting the results of her cancer tests. Her next film, and her first in color, was Le Bonheur (1965), a pioneering feminist manifesto wherein a misguided protagonist convinces himself that he can live copacetically with both his wife and his mistress.

Many of Varda's subsequent productions were heavily influenced by her political views. While visiting America with her director-husband Jacques Demy in 1968, she directed two tractlike short subjects, one of which -- Black Panthers (1969) -- was a paean to activist Huey Newton. Her 1970 production Nausicaa, a TV documentary about Greeks living in France, was so politically volatile that (according to Varda) it was banned outright by Greece's military government. Seldom motivated by commercial considerations (though she was willing to dash off two short subjects on behalf of the French National Tourist Office), Varda continued experimenting with new forms into the '70s; her German documentary Daguerreotypes (1974) was comprised of 4000 still photos (an extension of Varda's fondness for "personifying" inanimate objects), while Response de Femmes (1975) was lensed in 8-millimeter. In 1977, she formed her own production company, Cine-Tamaris. Its first effort was One Sings, the Other Doesn't, a celebration of "the happiness of being a woman" that proved to be a worldwide success. Varda would not make another theatrical film until the highly acclaimed 1985 docudrama Vagabond, a bleak, powerful portrait of an ill-fated young drifter (played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who won a César for her performance).

In addition to her own films, Varda has written dialogue for the works of others, most notably for Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. She also served as producer for her husband's Lady Oscar. As Demy lay dying in 1990, Varda expressed her love and appreciation for her husband in the eloquent Jacquot de Nantes (1991); though many believed that this would be her farewell film, she was back in 1995 with Les Cent et Une Nuits. Among the many awards bestowed upon Varda have been the Prix Melies for Cleo de 5 a 7 and the Prix Louis Delluc and Berlin Film Festival Special Award for Le Bonheur. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

PRESS / MEDIA

To download press kit, visit: http://www.sjiff.org/filmstills.html

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SHOWTIME

SUN. 10/04 at 3:00PM
Stockton Empire Theatre

TICKETS

Film
$9.00 General
$8.00 Senior 65+, Student with ID
$7.00 Film Society Members

• order tickets online

CAST AND CREW

Production Company: Ciné Tamaris
Screenwriter: Agnés Varda
Producer: Agnés Varda
Editor: Baptiste Filloux, Jean-Baptiste Morin
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz, Stéphane Vilar
Principal Cast: Click Here for IMDB

SOURCES

Print Source:
www.cinemaguild.com