L'opéra-mouffe

A bit overshadowed by the works of male filmmakers of the late 1950s and early Sixties in France –as Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut and Resnais-, that helped to found the "nouvelle vague", Varda is nevertheless known as the "grandmother" of this film movement, with her praised first feature "La Pointe-Courte" (1956) and this beautiful short made in Paris while she was pregnant, a homage to the Mouffetard street in Paris and its people, to love, life and old age, which she defined as "neighborhood cinéma." A fresh and free-form exercise of images, songs and inter-titles, it confirmed the promise of a talented and innovative director, who went on to make more remarkable films as "Cléo de 5 à 7" (1961), "Sans toit ni loi" (1985), and, at 72, "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse."