Faces Places

“Visages Villages”, Agnès Varda & J.R., 2017, France, Colour, 94 mins, Certificate: 12

This is a very special screening of a very special film: a documentary made as a quirky road movie tracing the unlikely pairing of two artists, generations apart but both very young at heart creatively, and the unexpected, arresting, and profound art they create together.

This is the joyous meeting of a 33 year old photographer and muralist with an 88 year old filmmaker and artist, as they travel up and down rural France together, on a mobile photo-booth, taking pictures of faces in their “natural” places to create geographically specific but emotionally universal, unlikely murals.

Perfectly screening on the Thursday between the two weekends of this year’s Sydenham Arts Artists Trail, it celebrates the beauty artists find in and create out of everyday life, as well as the – now more essential than ever – healing powers of their art.

Multi award winner around the world and a Best Documentary Oscar nominee, it is Varda’s penultimate film, and if you experienced our screening of her equally wonderful Beaches, on what would have been her 91st birthday, you know that it will lift your spirits and warm your heart for days, months, yes, maybe even years to come.

“If the magnificently moving, funny, life-affirming, and altogether wonderful “Faces Places” (or, in its original language, the much smoother “Visages Villages”) is to be the 88-year-old Belgian auteur’s last film,… then it will be one of cinema’s most extraordinary sendoffs, as poignant and perfect a swan song as Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises” or Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love.” David Ehrlich, IndieWire

★★★★ “Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.” Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“But has there ever been a director who gives the lie to the old-man’s-movie trope like Agnès Varda? She’s 88, and makes films like she’s 28. Her movies are the opposite of old wo(man’s) movies. They’re a tonic — just watching them makes you feel younger.” Owen Gleiberman, Variety

★★★★★ “If there’s a message in Visages, Villages (both to us, and from Varda to her young friend) is that one does not need to be a tortured and nasty person to make great art. She is living and still-working proof.” Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian