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Netflix made headlines at Cannes for buying Todd Haynes’ “May December” for $11 million, but it’s also spending money on film history. The streamer is one of several entities getting into the Agnes Varda business this year by investing in a new project to reignite interest in the late French New Wave filmmaker’s work.

Varda’s daughter, producer Rosalie Varda, announced at Cannes this week that she had secured financing for “Education in Images: ‘The Gleaners and I,'” an ambitious heritage project for film students built out of restored dailies from Varda’s seminal 1999 documentary. The digital platform will be made available to film schools around the world and cull from 60 hours of rushes from Varda’s poetic 2000 documentary “The Gleaners and I,” which explores the unique lives and challenges of gleaners throughout French society. Students will be able to use the platform to create their own versions...

While Agnès Varda explored her own work throughout her career, including in The Beaches of Agnès, her TV series From Here to There, and her final film Varda by Agnès, a new documentary has been announced that will take a look at the late, legendary Belgian-born French director’s massive contributions to the art of cinema.

Variety reports Mk2 Films, Cinétévé Sales, and Varda’s own Ciné-Tamaris have backed Viva Varda!, which will feature never-before-seen archival footage along with interviews from directors, including Atom Egoyan and Audrey Diwan. Helmed by Pierre-Henri Gibert, the film features interviews with friends, family, and collaborators, including Varda’s children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, along with Sandrine Bonnaire, Patricia Mazuy, and Jonathan Romney. With a French Cinémathèque retrospctive also taking place the fall, here’s hoping the documentary will debut for the occasion.

“With the upcoming homage at the French Cinémathèque, I felt like...

Agnès Varda, the late New Wave cinema legend, is the subject of “Viva Varda!,” a documentary boasting exclusive archive footage and interviews by filmmakers such as Atom Egoyan and Audrey Diwan. Mk2 Films is co-representing the documentary feature with Cinétévé Sales.

“Viva Varda!” will be first portrait of the Honorary Oscar recipient that’s not directed by Varda herself. The last film she directed was “Varda par Agnes,” a documentary shedding light on her own experiences as a filmmaker. Her sprawling career and legacy will be celebrated this fall at the French Cinémathèque.

Pierre-Henri Gibert, a film buff who’s made several documentaries about filmmakers, including Jacques Audiard, explored different aspects of Varda’s life and body of work and conducted insightful interviews with friends, family, and collaborators, including Varda’s children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, along with Sandrine Bonnaire, Patricia Mazuy and Jonathan Romney, among others.

“Viva Varda!

Warner Bros. Discovery has had a rough go of it recently. The newly-formed mega corporation’s decision to callously prune HBO Max’s servers of hours of content has led to mountains of bad PR and billions of dollars in market cap losses. Suffice it to say, a jam-packed list of new HBO Max releases for September 2022 would provide some welcome relief for the “House of the House of the Dragon.”

Unfortunately, HBO Max’s new releases this month are uncommonly light. It’s impossible to say whether this is the result of more Wbd meddling or simply some bad scheduling luck but either way it’s not going to make any executives’ seats less warm. There are only a handful of notable originals this month, led by season 2 of the Spanish language comedy Los Espookys on Sept. 16. That is joined by a pair of documentaries, Escape from Kabul on Sept.

With the psychedelic zaniness of “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky invented the concept of the midnight movie, but even the filmmaker’s most outrageous gambles weren’t weird-for-weirdness’ sake. His filmmaking matches its trippier elements with sensitive, even sensual, qualities, so it’s unsurprising that a director keen on burrowing inside his audience’s mind also fancies himself a therapist.

“Psychomagic, A Healing Art” is a wandering non-fiction collage of the shamanic service Jodorowsky has offered tortured souls for decades and allows the 91-year-old to make the case for his strange services. The result is , a dreamlike chronicle of human suffering for which Jodorowsky offers a wild solution on par with his craziest filmmaking conceits.

Jodorowsky has appeared in his own stories before, guiding audiences through autobiographical dramas “The Dance of Reality” and “Endless Poetry,” but in “Psychomagic” he’s less storyteller, more interdimensional reality show host.

When director Agnès Varda came out with her 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places, co-directed with the artist Jr, many people assumed it would be her final film. In her late 80s at that point, her eyesight was failing—if not her unquenchable curiosity.

But in fact she would complete one more film before her death in March at age 90. Varda by Agnès, the capstone to a remarkable career in cinema, plays at AFI Fest in Los Angeles November 21. The next day it opens in theaters in New York before expanding nationwide.

“It’s a way of saying goodbye,” Varda explained at the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, a month before her passing. “I have to prepare myself to say goodbye and to go away. It’s fine.”

The film is built around talks Varda gave late in her career about her work. Rosalie Varda, the...

Pictured: Louise Detlefsen and Louise Kjeldsen’s “Fat Front,” about a rebellious movement started by plus-sized women in Scandinavia, world premieres at Idfa.

Danish documentarian Jørgen Leth, whose 1967 short “The Perfect Human” inspired fellow countryman Lars Von Trier as a film student, will be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at Idfa this year. The prolific 82-year-old, based in Haiti, is just one of a number of non-fiction heavyweights to be celebrated at the Amsterdam festival, which will also offer posthumous tributes to Agnes Varda and D.A. Pennebaker, who passed away this year.

Under festival director Orwa Nyrabia, in his second year, Idfa continues to focus on directors from emerging territories as well as films dealing with pressing contemporary issues. In the Frontlight section, Claudia Sparrow’s “Maxima” deals with a Peruvian farmer forced to defend her land against the gold-mining industry; Jia Yuchuan’s “The Two Lives of Li Ermao...

Reverberations from the 2018 Women’s March in Cannes echoed all the way to the Bell Lightbox this year as the Toronto Intl. Film Festival played host to a social-minded pack of filmmakers transforming the French industry.

Alongside projects from women’s march leaders Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), Rebecca Zlotowski (“Savages”) and the late Agnès Varda (“Varda by Agnès”), the festival screened works from rising talents Justine Triet (“Sibyl”), Mati Diop (“Atlantics”) and Alice Winocour (“Proxima”) — and the fact that they all hit Toronto at the same time is not some happy accident.

“There’s definitely a new generation of women filmmakers in France, and they are creating a new wave,” says Iris Brey, a Franco-American author and academic. “Even if they’re all very different, and offer different cinematic experiences, they represent an emerging group that has decided to tell their stories from a feminine point of view.

Nearly a decade since Ava DuVernay launched Array, what was initially a small distribution company has grown to become a multimedia empire that now sits on a sprawling Los Angeles campus. The gated property in Historic Filipinotown contains, among several things, post-production facilities and a recently completed state-of-the-art, 50-seat theater that will screen Array titles, work by local artists, and an annual film series, which was announced today, curated and funded by DuVernay’s non-profit Array Alliance. Titled Array 360, the program will bring together award-winning filmmakers and emerging artists for six weekends of cinema, community, and conversation.

Array 360 will run from September 27 – November 2 at the all-new Amanda Theater, as the new screening space will be called. The inaugural slate features a celebration of women filmmakers including Agnès Varda, Euzhan Palcy, Barbara Loden, Suzana Amaral, Kathleen Collins, Shirin Neshat, Garrett Bradley, and Mati Diop, among others; a John Singleton retrospective; a...

The opening day Telluride Film Festival brunch had a surprise guest: director Martin Scorsese. He mingled with the likes of Antonio Banderas, Sterling K. Brown, Noah Baumbach, and Bong Joon Ho, who all came to town for the 46th installment of the festival. All harbor hopes for rousing acclaim as they go into a fall awards corridor that’s clouded by exhibition anxiety: The rising power of streamers and questions about studio support of the struggling mid-level adult drama are all too real.

But not today, Satan. Scorsese was not schlepping to the Rockys to mount a surprise screening of one of the fall’s most anticipated movies, “The Irishman,” but to cheer on the Safdie brothers’ noisy festival rouser “Uncut Gems”, which he executive-produced, and pay homage to the late, great Agnès Varda, whose last film “Varda by Agnès” is showing here. She gave him moral support over the years,...

The opening day Telluride Film Festival brunch had a surprise guest: director Martin Scorsese. He mingled with the likes of Antonio Banderas, Sterling K. Brown, Noah Baumbach, and Bong Joon Ho, who all came to town for the 46th installment of the festival. All harbor hopes for rousing acclaim as they go into a fall awards corridor that’s clouded by exhibition anxiety: The rising power of streamers and questions about studio support of the struggling mid-level adult drama are all too real.

But not today, Satan. Scorsese was not schlepping to the Rockys to mount a surprise screening of one of the fall’s most anticipated movies, “The Irishman,” but to cheer on the Safdie brothers’ noisy festival rouser “Uncut Gems”, which he executive-produced, and pay homage to the late, great Agnès Varda, whose last film “Varda by Agnès” is showing here. She gave him moral support over the years,...

Paris-based mk2 films, which is in Venice with three films including Robert Guédiguian’s competition entry “Gloria Mundi,” is bowing sales on a raft of prestige documentaries, notably Jia Zhang-ke’s “So Close to My Land” and Jacques Loeuille’s “Birds of America.”

“So Close to My Land” marks the sixth collaboration between mk2 and the Chinese auteur, whose latest film, “Ash Is Purest White,” competed at Cannes in 2018. Jia also competed at Cannes with “Mountains May Depart” in 2015 and “A Touch of Sin,” which won the best screenplay award in 2013.

“So Close to My Land” is the third and final installment in a trilogy focusing on different artistic disciplines in China, after “Dong” (2006), about an acclaimed painter, and “Useless” (2007), about the fashion and clothing industry. Jia’s 2010 film “I Wish I Knew” played at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, while “Useless” and “Dong” opened at Venice and won prizes.

An...

Yorgos Lanthimos short joins the line-up and Antonio Banderas is among conversation guests.

The Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) has revealed an In Conversation With…. line-up that includes Antonio Banderas and the selection of Mati Diop as the inaugural recipient of the festival’s Mary Pickford Award.

The In Conversation programme at this year’s festival (September 5-15) will comprise sessions with Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx from Just Mercy, Banderas from Pain and Glory and The Laundromat, Allison Janney from Bad Education and Kerry Washington from American Son.

The inaugural Mary Pickford Award, which recognises an emerging female...

Agnès Varda's final film Varda by Agnès will open Nov. 22 in select cinemas in New York City, followed by a nationwide rollout.

The plan was revealed Monday by Janus Films, which has acquired U.S. rights to the documentary. The pic made its world premiere in February at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, weeks before the celebrated godmother of French New Wave cinema died at 90 at her home in Paris.

In Varda by Agnès — which is set to screen at the upcoming New York Film Festival — Varda turned the lens on herself and ...

Agnès Varda's final film Varda by Agnès will open Nov. 22 in select cinemas in New York City, followed by a nationwide rollout.

The plan was revealed Monday by Janus Films, which has acquired U.S. rights to the documentary. The pic made its world premiere in February at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, weeks before the celebrated godmother of French New Wave cinema died at 90 at her home in Paris.

In Varda by Agnès — which is set to screen at the upcoming New York Film Festival — Varda turned the lens on herself and ...

Special Events, Retrospective, Revivals, and more to be announced shortly.

New York Film Festival brass have announced the full line-up, adding Bong Joon Ho’s Palme d’Or winner Parasite, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, and Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winner Synonyms,to the roster.

Overall the slate encompasses films from 17 countries and includes Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory from Spain, Juliano Dornelles’ Cannes Jury Prize–winner Bacurau from Brazil, French auteur Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network, Mati Diop’s Cannes Grand Prix–winner Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story, Kelly Reichardt’s anticipated First Cow,...

Back in March, the film world lost one of its legends, with the passing of acclaimed filmmaker Agnès Varda. Having been such a huge part of the history of film over the last 50+ years, the filmmaker was an icon to many that enjoy the medium and stayed busy up until the very end. And fittingly, she premiered her latest film, “Varda by Agnès” just a month before her passing.

Continue reading ‘Varda By Agnès’ Trailer: Incredible Filmmaker Agnès Varda Turned The Camera On Herself For Her Final Film at The Playlist.

Other openers include cricket doc ‘The Edge’ and ‘Tell It To The Bees’.

CGI animation The Lion King is the latest Disney remake to hit UK cinemas, and will look to challenge the highest openings of the year on its first weekend.

Its target will be the £31.4m three-day gross of Avengers: Endgame in April this year – by some distance the record opening weekend for a film in the UK.

The presence of several other blockbuster titles still in cinemas – Toy Story 4 and Aladdin from Disney, plus Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home – make this a lofty goal.

However...

‘Judy & Punch’. (Photo: Ben King)

Two Aussie films, Mirrah Foulkes’ Judy & Punch and Ben Lawrence’s Hearts and Bones, will be among the 12 features in official competition at this year’s Sydney Film Festival (Sff).

Also up for the festival’s $60,000 Sydney Film Prize are Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, which was nominated for two Oscars; recent Cannes selections such as Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, and Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau; Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award winner Monos, from directors Alejandro Landes and Alexis Dos; Joanna Hogg’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner The Souvenir; Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear winner Synonymes, as well as Sacha Polak’s Dirty God, Teona Strugar Mitevska’s God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya, and Kiwi director Hamish Bennett’s Bellbird.

Sydney Film Festival launched the full program for its 66th...

Until today, if you had asked me to name the greatest living filmmaker, I would have answered Agnès Varda. What a loss that the 90-year-old director — who died Friday, leaving behind such intimate masterpieces as “Cléo from 5 to 7,” “Vagabond,” and “The Gleaners and I” — will create no more.

Her passing is a chance for the world of cinema to come together and recognize the achievements of an outsider artist who lived long enough to appreciate the impact her work has had on both audiences and multiple generations of younger directors. Before the French New Wave took form in the late 1950s, it was Varda who paddled out from shore and shouted, “Hey boys, come on in! The water’s fine!” And in recent years, with a series of increasingly personal documentaries — including two, “The Beaches of Agnès” and “Faces Places,” that the Los Angeles Film Critics awarded along the way...

Forever blurring the borders between art and life, work and play, fact and fiction, Agnès Varda was a mother of reinvention, as much living artwork as pioneering filmmaker and proto-feminist icon. The Oscar-winning queen mother of French New Wave cinema, whose death at 90 was announced today, had a childlike mischief and tireless curiosity that sustained a remarkably diverse career spanning more than six decades. “Nothing is trite if you film people with empathy and love,” she says in her final film, Varda by Agnès (2019).

A gnome-like figure with an impish grin and an electric mop ...

Forever blurring the borders between art and life, work and play, fact and fiction, Agnès Varda was a mother of reinvention, as much living artwork as pioneering filmmaker and proto-feminist icon. The Oscar-winning queen mother of French New Wave cinema, whose death at 90 was announced today, had a childlike mischief and tireless curiosity that sustained a remarkably diverse career spanning more than six decades. “Nothing is trite if you film people with empathy and love,” she says in her final film, Varda by Agnès (2019).

A gnome-like figure with an impish grin and an electric mop ...

Update (11:40am Et): Martin Scorsese has issued the following statement on Varda:

“I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art…which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s—every image, every cut… What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive. I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn’t have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn’t want to miss a thing. I feel so lucky to have known her. And...

Agnès Varda, the French New Wave director and filmmaking icon behind such films as “Cleo From 5 to 7” and “Vagabond,” has died at age 90. Varda passed away from breast cancer at her home in Paris early March 29. The death was confirmed by Varda’s family, who issued a statement saying Varda was “surrounded by her family and friends” at the time of her passing. The family described the filmmaker as a “joyful feminist” and “passionate artist.” Varda’s funeral is expected to take place in Paris on Tuesday.

Varda got her start as a still photographer before making the jump to feature filmmaking with the 1955 drama “La Pointe Courte.” The film, starring Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret, is widely considered to be one of the forerunners of the French New Wave.

Varda’s second feature, “Cleo From 5 to 7,” was entered into the Cannes Film Festival and earned her international acclaim.

The legendary, lovely Agnès Varda has passed away at the age of 90. The French New Wave pioneer died from cancer “at her home in the night of March 29, 2019, surrounded by her family and friends,” her family confirmed. She recently premiered her final film Varda by Agnès at Berlinale, on the heels of both an honorary Academy Award and her Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places.

Born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928, she began her creative career in 1948 as a photographer before moving into filmmaking in 1954 prior to the beginning of the French New Wave. From her first feature La Pointe Courte all the way through Varda by Agnès, the director has had a uniquely playful eye when it comes to the cinematic form, from her landmark films Cléo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, and Vagabond to her immensely inventive and heartfelt documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.

This century,...

Varda passed away following a short battle with cancer.

Agnès Varda, the Belgian-born director whose work played a pivotal part in the French New Wave, has died aged 90.

She died shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, according to a statement from her family given to French news agency Afp. It said: ”The director and artist Agnès Varda died at home on Thursday night due to cancer, with her family and loved ones surrounding her.”

Her death comes just weeks after Varda put in a fitting final appearance at the Berlin International Film Festival with the documentary Varda By Agnès.

An extended filmed masterclass of sorts,...

Varda passed away following a short battle with cancer.

Agnes Varda, the Belgian-born director whose work played a pivotal part in the French New Wave, has died aged 90.

According to a statement from her family given to Afp, she passed away following a short battle with cancer. It said: ”The director and artist Agnès Varda died at home on Thursday night due to cancer, with her family and loved ones surrounding her.”

He final film, Varda By Agnès, premiered at the Berlin Film earlier this year, where it was awarded the Berlinale Camera award.

In 2017 she became the first female...

The 69th Berlin International Film Festival has wrapped. On February 17 — “Berlinale Pubic Day” — movie-goers flocked to cinemas a last time to experience the highlights from the different sections of this year’s festival. With 335.000 tickets sold and its wide-ranging program, the Berlinale was again a smash with audiences. The Award Ceremony at the Berlinale Palast on February 16 brought the industry event to an end.

For all awards, click here.

At the Closing Gala, Nadav Lapid’s film Synonymes (Synonyms) was awarded the Golden Bear for Best Film. During the ten days of the festival, the Honorary Golden Bear was awarded to actor Charlotte Rampling, and Berlinale Cameras to director Agnès Varda, producer Sandra Schulberg, director Herrmann Zschoche, and long-time head of the Panorama Wieland Speck.

With the Berlinale 2019, Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick bid farewell after 18 years as Festival Director. To summarize the accomplishments of his...

The Berlinale Camera was presented to Agnès Varda on February 13 at the Berlinale Palast. This was followed by the world premiere of Varda’s documentary ‘Varda par Agnès’ (‘Varda by Agnès’), screened out of competition in the section Competition. The laudatory speech was given by Christoph Terhechte, who headed the Berlinale’s Forum section for many years.

After the surprising and wonderful Faces, Places I expect to see Varda in a new incarnation and I was not at all disappointed. This documentary about her and by her is an catalogue raisonné of her work since her first feature La Pointe Courte, in 1954 and 1962’s Cleo from 5 to 7, which I remember so well first seeing it while I was discovering my first foreign films, to her work today which goes beyond cinema’s Faces, Places and ventures into the visual high arts with installations and exhibits as shown in the Museum of Modern Art,...

Something curious happened to Agnès Varda with her last film, the freewheeling, personality-driven road doc “Faces Places”: At the age of 88, 60-odd years and 20-odd films into her career, she suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a meme. A wave of critics that had never previously demonstrated much interest in Varda’s work took to the new film at Cannes, the Academy suddenly lavished her with a nomination and an honorary Oscar after decades of looking the other way, and the director’s wry, twinkly presence and two-tone Miyazaki-witch bob became ubiquitous on the festival and publicity circuits — inspiring a surfeit of adoring tributes, T-shirts and Twitter threads in their wake. Varda acquired a rare celebrity status for an auteur. Heading into her tenth decade, it seemed the woman was better known than her own work.

How exactly do you follow that up, given that “Faces Places” was never meant to be a watershed work?...

Apologies if this reads like a eulogy for a living artist, but has anyone ever died more joyfully than Agnès Varda? Famous since the release of her debut feature in 1954, and even more so by 1961 — when her “Cléo from 5 to 7” arrived at the crest of the French New Wave — the Belgian photographer, filmmaker, and installation creator has only gotten more iconic as she’s grown older. That’s especially evident in “Varda by Agnès,” which she has called her final film.

In part, Varda’s growing clout stems from the singular look she’s adopted (a two-tone bob and the wry smile of a good witch in a Miyazaki film). And in part, that’s because Varda has put so much of herself on camera. While her playful curiosity for the world and all its people is evident in her fiction work, it’s perhaps most palpable in her digital age documentaries,...