Les plages d’Agnès

"If they open me up, they'll find beaches," states octogenarian filmmaker Agnès Varda, one of cinema's great masters. From to , her work spans fiction and documentary, defying genre. Varda once lamented: "You say documentary and people say what a bore. We should have middle words." is an auto-bio film, an accumulation of memories, rich with imaginative texture. Varda takes us on a surrealist, hyper-journey through her life, on a magic carpet ride of images, photographs, filmclips, stories, installations and set tableaux. Beginning with images of family, she crosses the Left Bank wing of the Nouveau Vague with Chris Marker and her long life with director Jacques Demy. From her hometown Sète to the rue Daguerre in Paris where she lives, the film circumnavigates a wonderful life. A brilliant construction, a montage mosaic, full of self-reflection, odd bits of everything, the imaginations of a free-thinking, proto-feminist philosopher, film meditations woven with observations and humour in her unique voice of cinema-writing. Varda exemplifies those introspective, cinematically inquisitive and poetic qualities all filmmakers strive for. Totally original, and idiosyncratic, she is an experimentalist, an essayist, a filmmaker's filmmaker. will be IDFA's closing film on Saturday 29 November.