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After nearly two years of planning, the digital platform “The Gleaners and I: Revisiting Agnès Varda’s Edit” is about to go live.

Supported by Martin Scorsese, the pedagogical platform will open the treasure trove of Agnès Varda’s archives, making never-before-seen footage and hours of unused rushes available to nascent filmmakers across the globe. Through “The Gleaners and I,” students at participating universities will be able to re-edit and completely rethink Varda’s 2000 documentary of the same name — pooling from 62 hours of rushes, all subtitled in English – under the proviso that each new clip edit be uploaded back on to the platform.

“Agnès would have surely loved the idea of having her work live on in this way,” says daughter and project leader Rosalie Varda. “She would want to give the students full freedom – and that’s what we’ve done. Participants can really reconceive the work however they see fit.

When a classic film industry meets at a market, what do they debate. One issue is maybe paramount these days: Distribution. The distribution of classic documentaries was at the heart of discussions at the Lumière Film Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France on Oct. 18.

Industry members ran through the challenges they face in bringing not just doc, but heritage doc, to the audience – a “niche within a niche,” according to Gérald Duchaussoy, who oversees programming and coordination for the Mifc.

For Catherine Bizern, managing and artistic director of doc fest Cinéma du Réel(CdR), heritage documentaries have their place in a booming classic film market.

“The key to getting classic docs back into theaters lies in restoration,” she says. “Instead of organizing retrospectives of forgotten movies that would be shown in poor-quality copies only once at our festival, it’s more interesting to support film restoration...

2023 Festival dedicated to founders Tom Luddy, Bill Pence, Stella Pence, James Card.

Telluride Film Festival has announced its 2023 50th anniversary line-up with Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall, and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City on the roster.

The selection, which will play in the Colorado Rockies locale from August 31 to September 4, includes Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes sensation The Zone Of Interest, Pablo Larrain’s El Conde, Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, George C. Wolfe’s Rustin, Nyad from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin,...

The people behind the scenes of the documentaries and nonfiction series at this year’s Emmy Awards sat down with Gold Derby and explain several topics including the first documentary that got their attention and, in the event that they win, what would be their ideal music to play as they make their way to the stage. This was all part of Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts panel on TV Documentaries that included Leah Wolchok (“Judy Blume Forever”), Ryan White, Lucinda Axelsson (“Secrets of the Elephants”), Nikole Hannah-Jones (“The 1619 Project”) and Padma Lakshmi (“Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi”).

You can watch the TV documentary group panel above with the people who made these five programs. Click on each person’s name above to be taken to each exclusive interview.

See over 200 video interviews with 2023 Emmy nominees

Wolchok’s love of documentaries came from seeing two films in...

Saturday marks the final day of the Cannes Film Festival, with the usual closing ceremonies and awards presentations along with the out-of-competition premiere of Pixar’s “Elemental.” Let us all hope that Disney release earns better festival notices than Lucafilm’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

“Perfect Days” makes a perfect debut.

Perfect Days. Did Wim Wenders just make his best film since Until The End Of The World? Holy crap.

— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) May 26, 2023

Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” was the hero of the day, earning strong notices and the now-standard standing ovation. TheWrap’s Nicholas Barber called it “an endearing, admiring portrait of a decent man.” The near-consensus was that Wenders had made his best narrative film in a very long time. The film has already been acquired by Neon, which has been on a shopping spree with “this film”Perfect Days, “Robot Dreams” and “Anatomy of a Fall.

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 we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

“Carmine Street Guitars” is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic. It’s a no-fuss, 80-minute-long portrait of Rick Kelly, who builds and sells custom guitars out of a modest storefront on Carmine Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the film touches on obsessions that have been popping up, like fragrant weeds, in the world of documentary. “Carmine Street Guitars” is all about the weirdly grounded pleasures of analog culture; about the glory of hand-made artisanal objects in a world dominated by mass corporate production; about the aging, and persistence, of old-school jazz and rock ‘n’ roll; about the fading of bohemia in a world of rising rents, omnivorous bottom lines, and chain-store values; and about how all those themes fuse into a Zen ideal of doing what you love and loving what you do.

The film sounds earnest and touching in a minor, twilight-of-the-’60s way.

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?...

French director is the first woman and only the fourth person to receive the honour after Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Agnès Varda is to receive an honorary Palme d’or at the 68th Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24).

The French filmmaker will the first female director to be given the honour. Previously, only Woody Allen, in 2002, Clint Eastwood, in 2009, and Bernardo Bertolucci, in 2011, have been granted this distinction.

“And yet my films have never sold as much as theirs,” she said of following in their footsteps with her well-known sense of humour.

The award is given by the festival’s board of directors to renowned directors whose works have achieved a global impact but who have never won Cannes’ top prize - the Palme d’or.

Varda, 86, is a photographer, writer, actress, director and visual artist.

She studied photography and learned the ropes at the Avignon Festival, where she was...

Stefano Knuchel, Head of the Locarno Film Summer Academy, invited me to sit in on his master class with the 2014 Locarno International Film Festival’s Pardo d’onore Swisscom winner French film director Agnès Varda.

Known as the Grandmother of the French New Wave (a term with which she takes issue, as I cite in my Conversation with Varda).Varda’s film credits include "La Pointe Courte" (1955), "Cleo from 5 to 7" (Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962), "The Creatures" (Les Créatures 1966), "Lions Love (…and Lies)" (1969), "Documenteur" (1981),"Vagabond"(Sans toit ni loi, 1985), "The Gleaners and I" (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and " The Beaches of Agnès" (Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008).

Speaking to the group of international students, Varda shared her passion for cinema, photography, and installation work, with humor and honesty. Here are some highlights from Varda’s talk.

I asked Varda about finding inspiration and her writing process

I don’t search for ideas; I find them. They come to me or I have none. I would not sit at a table and think now I have to find ideas. I wait until something disturbs me enough, like a relationship I heard about, and then it becomes so important I have to write the screenplay.

I never wrote with someone else or directed together. I wouldn’t like that. I never worked with (her late husband, director Jacques) Demy. We would show screenplays to each other when we were finished.

When you are a filmmaker, you are a filmmaker all the time. Your mind is recording impressions, moods. You are fed with that. Inspiration is getting connections with the surprises that you see in life. Suddenly it enters in your world and it remains; you have to let it go and work on it. It’s contradictory.

Question from Student: How did you manage to navigate a male-dominated film world?

First, stop saying it’s a male world. It’s true, but it helps not to repeat it. When I started in film, I did a new language of cinema, not as a woman, but as a filmmaker. It is still a male world, as long women are not making the same salary as men.

Put yourself in a situation where you want to make films; whether you are woman or not a woman, give yourself the tools: maybe you intern, maybe you go to school, or read books. Get the tools.

On Filmmaking

We have to capture in film what we don’t know about.

If you don’t have a point-of-view it’s not worth starting to make a film.

Whatever we do in film is searching. If you meet somebody, you establish yourself, who you want to meet, what kind of relationship it is. Our whole life is made up of back and forth, decisions, options -- and then they don’t fit.

When one is filming we should be fragile; listen to that something in ourselves. The act of filming for me is so vivid, it includes what you had in mind, and includes what is happening around you at that moment -- how you felt, if you have headache, and so on. A film builds itself with what you don’t know.

Life interferes. You have friends. Kids. No kids. Then there is a leak on the wall. Everything interferes. It’s how you build the life with others.

Sometimes I go by myself to do location scouting. When I go by myself, something speaks to me in a place I’ve chosen and I know maybe we should take advantage of that. We have to be working with chance. ‘Chance’ is my assistant director.

About Cleo de 5-7

I had to be able calculate the time of speaking, taking a taxi, and so on -- it was very interesting to write what was happening and try the mechanical thing of time, to let emotion and surprise come in.

About Vagabond

I knew people who were on the road. I knew the kind of people she (Mona, the protagonist) would meet. I would write the dialogue the night before. The people I met gave me their attitude and state of mind.

About "The Beaches of Agnès"

It was supposed to be autobiographical. Like a gesture of a painter, when they do a self-portrait and look at themselves and paint. In "The Beaches of Agnès" I am turning the mirror to the people who surround me; it’s not so much about what I did in my past. It is about how you build the life with others. I am turning the mirror to the people who surround me.

Varda on Varda

In the last ten years, I’ve done installations in museums and galleries. I enjoy that other expression of things. I got out of the flat film screen -- to invade the space, using three- dimensional objects. It helps to express other things. You put yourself at risk. I’ve been experimenting in motion, and surprises.I’m naturally curious.

Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College and presents international workshops and seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with over 1,000 writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...

French director to receive the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno Film Festival next month - only the second woman to receive the honour.

French director Agnès Varda is to receive the Pardo d’onore (honorary Leopard) at the 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16).

The festival’s tribute to her will be accompanied by screenings of a selection of her films: the features Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), The Creatures (1966), Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), Documenteur (1981), Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985), The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and The Beaches of Agnes (Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008), and the short film Oncle Yanco (1967), as well as the five episodes of the TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011).

Varda will also take part in an on-stage coversation at the festival.

After working as a theatre photographer, Varda began directing in 1954 with the feature-length film La Pointe Courte, starring [link=nm...

The American Film Institute (AFI) announced a program of four films selected by Guest Artistic Director Agnès Varda to screen at AFI Fest 2013 presented by Audi. Varda, once a resident of Los Angeles, makes a rare return to present and discuss her work at AFI Fest. As an additional tribute to Varda, photos from her influential French New Wave film Cleo From 5 to 7 (CLÉO De 5 À 7) are featured in this year’s festival marketing and programming materials.

As Guest Artistic Director, Varda has selected films that have inspired her throughout her six-decade career: Pickpocket (Dir Robert Bresson, 1959), A Woman Under The Influence (Dir John Cassavetes, 1974), The Marriage Of Maria Braun (Dir Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979) and After Hours (Dir Martin Scorsese, 1985). In addition, the festival will be screening a selection of Varda’s films, including restored versions of Cleo From 5 To 7 (CLÉO De 5 À 7) and Documenteur.

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read here), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of favorite films. Eleanor Burke & Ron Eyal (Stranger Things) provided us with a combined/all time top ten film list (dated: April 2013).

Les Quatres cents Coups Blows (400 Blows) – Francois Truffaut (1959)

“I saw this when I was at secondary school (high school) and there was something in it that really spoke to me. It’s the film that made me want to be a director.” (Eb)

“Truffaut was getting out there onto the streets of Paris with the camera and capturing life. I love the playful scene with Antoine turning upside-down on the Rotor, and that final breathtaking tracking shot as Antoine runs down to the sea.” (Re)

Le Notti di Cabiria...

In the battle against food waste and hunger, the ancient tradition of gleaning is gaining new admirers around America. Kathleen Maloney on how it's changed the D.C. food system.

With the rise of obesity levels and food prices in the U.S., very little attention has been paid to the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who salvage millions of pounds of fresh food every year by gleaning-the collection of food left behind from a harvest-which provides those in need with free or inexpensive healthy produce they otherwise would have no access to.

Parker Farms in Oak Grove, Virginia, has been welcoming gleaning groups since the late 1980s, to gather what is left behind from the harvests. "The biggest value to the farm is that product that was raised for the purpose of consumption, is consumed," said Rod Parker, general manager, who added that much of the...

Start: 06/24/2009 End: 06/27/2009 Timezone: America/Los Angeles Start: 06/24/2009 End: 06/27/2009 Timezone: America/Los Angeles If you're in Los Angeles, catch a crapload of films by legendary Varda June 24-27th 2009! A gifted and outspoken feminist and one of the most acclaimed directors anywhere in the world, Agnès Varda could be considered the prototype of today's independent filmmaker. Varda is a survivor, a stubborn and patient observer of her time and her people, like the pop singer in Cleo from 5 to 7, the lovers in Le Bonheur or the drifter in Vagabond. "I have fought so much since I started ... for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that," Varda has said...

Varda directed her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, with no formal training in filmmaking. The movie has often been identified as the film that started the French New Wave ("and a famous flop,...