The Beaches of Agnes

Octogenarian French filmmaker Agnès Varda has produced one of the most inventive and lyrical autobiographies ever committed to film in The Beaches of Agnès.

A crucial player in postwar French cinema, she is noted for such features as Cleo from 5 to Seven (1962) and was married to another noted director, Jacques Demy (best-known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). In The Beaches of Agnès, she grounds her memories in her childhood holidays and wartime exile by the sea, to which she would return in 1954 to shoot her first feature, La pointe courte. Looking back over almost six decades of artistic activity through film clips, photographs, and present-day sequences of her revisiting hallmark locations from her life and career, she presents a lively yet deeply moving meditation on life, loss, and creation. (109 mins., 35mm)