A leading postwar director, an initiator of the New Wave, hailed during her lifetime as a rock star in Hollywood, Agnès Varda has become a source of inspiration for a whole new generation of filmmakers.
With works such as Cléo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I, she created an œuvre that is offbeat, open towards the world, sensitive to the most vulnerable, and often eccentric. Always in tune with the times, she shook up cinema itself, which she refused to reduce to pure fiction or only feature films.
Agnès Varda established herself as a free woman, constantly unpredictable, at once perplexing in her trajectory and appealing in her tenacity, her courage, carrying her desire to the limit – however disconcerting.
Agnès Varda spoke a great deal about herself, thus ensuring a monopoly of the narrative on her own work, rewriting her story and refining her legacy. And what if, beyond these official accounts, the reality was even more extraordinary? This conviction has fuelled the impetus of this portrait in which for the first time, instead of Agnès Varda recounting her own life, the story is told by her close friends, collaborators and fellow filmmakers, including her children Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, as well as Sandrine Bonnaire, Patricia Mazuy, Audrey Diwan and Atom Egoyan.
Thanks to extensive archive material, much of which has never been seen before, the film traces her extraordinary destiny, which one cannot but admire.
For Agnès Varda indeed made films, but her greatest achievement was herself. Her life was a novel… Agnès Varda led her life with unbridled freedom, refusing to submit to the social roles assigned to girls, to what people say, to decorum, to morals, to societal power relations or to commercial logic.
Above all, the film tells the story of   a woman who is only interested in the present, who thrives in perpetual movement, in constant step with the times, whose work is a fascinating mirror of both France and the United States, making her a universally loved artist from generation to generation.

Lila Biro is a remarkable character who witnessed Rossellini in India, played a key role in the cutting of key titles of the French New Wave, and was a close collaborator of the Hungarian émigré painter, Atila Biro. For me, however, she’s also the star witness in a crime against film grammar: the jump cut. The editing style of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is now legendary, but I’ve always wondered what it must have been like in the cutting room when that revolutionary editorial decision was made. Thanks to Lila, that moment is vividly brought to life.

Daniel Bird