DU CÔTÉ DE LA CÔTE 1958 28 Min
Tongue-in-cheek look at the French Riviera, especially in summer when it overflows with tourists. Reviews its history and famous visitors; displays its faux-exotic buildings, its crowded beaches, its trees and monuments; and, pokes fun at the colors women wear and the vagaries of fashion. The film celebrates the use of “Eden” as a place name, suggesting that paradise comes to the coast after all are gone, perhaps only on a remote island beach.

SALUT LES CUBAINS 1964 30 Min
Agnès Varda constructed this invigorating travelogue from over four hundred still photographs taken during a trip to Cuba in the wake of its 1959 revolution. Through fluid montage, the people captured by her camera come to playful, loving life.

UNCLE YANCO 1968 18 Min
In her effervescent first California film, Agnès Varda delves into her own family history. The short documentary Uncle Yanco features Varda tracking down a Greek emigrant relative she’s never met, discovering an artist and kindred soul leading a bohemian life in Sausalito.

BLACK PANTHERS 1970 28 Min
Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive short is also a powerful political statement.

ULYSSE 1983 22 Min
In this ruminative cross-pollination of film and photography, Agnès Varda uses a mysterious still image that she took in the late fifties—of a nude man (the photographer Guy Bourdin, a friend of hers) and a toddler on a rocky beach, flanked by a dead goat with a swelling belly in the foreground—as the springboard for a contemplation on the passing of time and the subjectivity of meaning in art.