Presented by VTIFF
Host Sponsor: Main Street Landing
Varda by Agnès
Directed and written by Agnès Varda
France | 2019 | Documentary | 120 mins
Film Source: Janus
Note: The film will be preceded by the short film Elegies, by Eiko Otake, John R.Killacky, and Brian Stevenson, 2019. See more information below.
Varda by Agnès
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, she acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—this wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
VARDA BY AGNES – TRAILER from Janus Films on Vimeo.
Elegies | USA | 9 mins 23 seconds
Eiko Otake, John R.Killacky, and Brian Stevenson – a collaboration
Artist/Legislator John R. Killacky collaborates with choreographer Eiko Otake to create intimate elegies to their dead mothers, austerely shot by cinematographer Brian Stevenson.
Artist statement
In 2017, choreographer Eiko Otake inaugurated The Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross generational experiments with a radical diversity of fellow artists both living and dead. In July 2018, while attending a tree planting ceremony for a mutual friend at Jacob’s Pillow, Eiko invited John Killacky to collaborate. John proposed to create a video work in which both of them speak to their dead mothers. John then asked Brian Stevenson to join as cinematographer. The work was developed by long distance communication and produced with the support of Vermont PBS in November 2019.