Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Faces Places 2017

Visages villages

Directed by Agnès Varda, JR

In this utterly charming documentary, octogenarian French director Agnès Varda takes to the road with the young photo-muralist JR, creating artworks, looking up old friends and finding new ones.

France In French with English subtitles
89 minutes DCP

Rent

Directors/Screenplay

Photography

Claire Duguet
,
Nicolas Guicheteau
,
Valentin Vignet
,
Romain Le Bonniec
,
Raphael Minnesota
,
Roberto De Angelis
,
Julia Fabry

Editors

Agnès Varda
,
Maxime Pozzi Garcia

Music

M (Matthieu Chedid)

With

Agnès Varda, JR

Festivals

Cannes (Out of Competition) 2017

Elsewhere

PROUDLY SPONSORED BY

The Pantograph Punch

88-year-old Agnès Varda, working in collaboration with the young photo-muralist JR, reminds us that big themes can live in small places – and that every life yields something to celebrate. As the two travel across France, looking up old friends and creating artworks from photographs of the people they meet, a friendship blossoms, and with it a wonderful free flow of ideas and observations.

“She is nearly 90; he is 34. She worked with Jean-Luc Godard; he looks like Jean-Luc Godard (and, much to Varda’s consternation, will similarly not take off his sunglasses). And yet, the movie is barely five minutes old before it’s clear that these two are a screen duo for the ages... Varda has always possessed a warm and compulsively watchable screen presence, and the pint-sized iconoclast still has more pep in her step than most of us have ever had… JR is an absolute joy (and a mensch, to boot)… Teasing at times, quietly deferential at others, he taps into his co-star’s inherent sense of wonder and creates a canvas big enough for her to fit all of the ideas that she’s still dying to project.” — David Ehrlich, Indiewire

“In her magnificent, groundbreaking, nearly 60-year career, this is one of her most profoundly personal and exuberantly populist works. A tour de France that is both a romp and a meditation on photography, cinema, and mortality, with brief appearances by Mimi, the scene-stealing cat, it is at once poetry and the naked truth, shape-shifting before one’s eyes, and promising ever more pleasure with each viewing.” — Amy Taubin, Film Comment