Agnes varda, the famous French filmmaker, is the subject of a biography made up of sublime and rare photos.

The first biography dedicated to the filmmaker

Editor, writer, historian and radio broadcaster: Laure Adler is all of these at the same time. She publishes the first biography dedicated to the filmmaker, photographer and visual artist Agnès Varda with rare archives. Varda who, like her, was a passer, feminist, and great witness of her time. Filmmaker, photographer, visual artist… Agnès Varda has explored multiple modes of expression to express society with great aesthetic standards. A witness to her time, she will also model it by giving a voice and a face to the most precarious, the marginalized, the rebels, and will actively participate in the fight for women’s rights.

A secret love

Laure Adler, her long-time friend, retraces this exceptional journey here in a rich and intimate biographical essay illustrated by more than 150 photographs from the archives… Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles in 1982, before hastily leaving Belgium, with her parents, two brothers and two sisters, for the South of France at the start of the War. His family settled in Sète, where they lived in a boat. There she will meet Valentine Schlegel, French sculptor and ceramist, her first great love before Jacques Demy, a relationship that Agnès Varda had never mentioned during her lifetime in her films or her interviews: “Rosalie opened all the boxes for me, all the possibilities, because Agnès Varda wrote every day, every morning. And in these archives, I found traces of this love. And the moment came when I dared to talk about it to Rosalie and she told me says “we are not going to keep this secret forever”. There are photographs which show the power of their love and the impetus that Valentine gave to Agnès to allow her to exist artistically.” Thanks to Valentine Schlegel, Agnès Varda will persevere in photography, before making cinema, a radical, daring, formalist cinema, in perpetual renewal.