Varda by Agnès review – inspiring look at a life in cinema

The Belgian director reviews her own career with wit and enthusiasm The pioneering Belgian film-maker and artist Agnès Varda presented this film at the Berlin international film festival in February this year; one month later she died . A documentary that takes the form of an illustrated lecture, it’s designed as a swansong, a greatest hits showcase that revisits and consolidates her extensive body of work. Yet despite the formal setting (an opera house transformed into a cinema and filled with rapt film students), Varda’s tone remains generously intimate, friendly and unpretentious. At 90 and dressed in her signature head-to-toe purple, she is lucid and funny, able to parse her “failures” (such as 1995’s Robert De Niro-starring One Hundred and One Nights ) as well as her successes. Running just shy of two hours, it’s a little long but, in Varda’s defence, there’s a lot of material to get through. Excited by “dreams and reveries”, cats and potatoes, beaches, mirrors, social justice movements (she made films