DOCUMENTEUR Guest Artistic Director

Subtitled “an emotion picture,” DOCUMENTEUR is Agnès Varda’s impressionistic study of a French typist (played by the film’s editor, Sabine Mamou), recently separated from her lover, who searches with her eight-year-old son (played by Varda’s real son, Mathieu Demy) for a modest place to live in L.A.’s then-dilapidated Venice Beach. Shot on location, the film is a striking assembly of real places (windy piers, lonely beaches, laundromats) and anonymous faces. Varda also highlights L.A.’s famous murals by the likes of Terry Schoonhoven, Vic Henderson and others. Text in the title sequence offers wordplay as it fashions the word documentaire (documentary) from meaningful words shared between the mother and son: “doDO, cuCU, maMAN, vas-tu-te TAIRE?” (“sleep, bum-bum, mommy, will you be quiet?”). Equally clever, the film’s title merges the words for “documentary” and “liar,” further blurring the line between fact and fiction. The film is as much a portrait of its time and place as it is a narrative about a mother and son trying to make ends meet. The dialogue – much of it delivered as interior monologue – is playful and rhythmic; a kind of stream of conscious, minimalist poetry.