In 1955, Agnès Varda kickstarted the French New Wave with her debut feature La Pointe Courte, and for the next six decades she remained at the cutting edge of international cinema, continuing to innovate, experiment, and explore right up until her death earlier this year at age 90. An eternal free spirit, Varda used the camera as an extension of herself, synthesizing the things that captured her restless imagination—the worlds of outcasts and outsiders, the California counterculture and the feminist movement, beaches and heart-shaped potatoes—into a singular style that she called “cinécriture” (“cinematic writing”). Moving between narrative and documentary (and hybrids of the two), film and video, photography and installation works, she remained, at each step of her career, inimitably herself: playful, probing, empathetic, wise, and inexhaustibly curious about the world whirling around her. Film at Lincoln Center is honored to present a comprehensive, career-spanning retrospective of the luminous filmmaker’s vast canon.

Highlights include New Wave treasures Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le bonheur; Varda’s inquiries into those on society’s outskirts in Vagabond (NYFF23), The Gleaners and I (NYFF38), and the 2017 Oscar nominee Faces Places (NYFF55); nonfiction portraits of activism in Black Panthers and Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex; and free screenings of the five-part miniseries Agnès Varda: From Here to There, which features Varda visiting filmmaker friends around the world including Carlos Reygadas, Alexander Sokurov, and Manoel de Oliveira. Varda’s daughter and producing partner, Rosalie Varda, will join audiences in person for select screenings. 

Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson in partnership with Janus Films.


Take home a piece of the retrospective at our merch store, featuring Varda totes, pins, and more! Also available at the EBM box office.