Agnès Varda

Agnes Varda came to cinema from photography. She had studied philosophy and art in Paris and was working as a photographer when, in 1954, aged twenty-five and with no film experience at all, she made La Pointe Courte. She is called the grandmother of the French New Wave, but she built her work on a curiosity about those at the edge of society and about women's subjectivity, and the result is playful and fiercely political at once. Cleo from 5 to 7 follows a singer waiting for the result of a biopsy in real time. For The Gleaners and I she took a digital camera in hand and played with form and angle, one of her starting points being a painting by Jean-Francois Millet. Jacquot she dedicated to her late husband Jacques Demy.