Vagabond
Agnès Varda’s Golden Lion winner starring Sandrine Bonnaire as a young drop-out roaming a wintery South of France returns to the Festival for the first time since 1986.
Description
Agnès Varda’s new film, which not only won Venice’s Golden Lion but the awards of the international critics as well, has echoes of her earlier work, Cleo from 5 to 7 and also recalls Alain Tanner’s superb Messidor. Its central character, beautifully played by Sandrine Bonnaire, is a young drop-out who roams a wintry south of France with a knapsack containing a tent on her back. She sleeps and eats where she can, a fiercely independent character little understood by even those who know her best. What she seeks is freedom, and her tragedy is that society extracts from her too great a price for it. Varda tells her story with a strong and simple eloquence that is very moving, and searches not so much for explanations as for emotional understanding. This is a film of considerable resonance precisely because it seeks neither to praise nor condemn, but to comprehend a profound alienation. —Derek Malcolm
Vagabond screened at the 1985 Festival with Agnès Varda in attendance.
Films from the Vault revisits previously presented titles at the San Francisco International Film Festival, highlighting the Festival’s role in championing emerging artists and iconic auteurs and inviting audiences to rediscover these films anew. —Jessie Fairbanks
Biographies
Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was among the pioneers of the French New Wave, directing seven shorts between 1955 and 1961 before making her first feature Cleo from 5 to 7. Her career would span more than five decades. Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977), The World of Jacques Demy (1995), The Gleaners and I (2000), and Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011) represent a sampling of Varda’s films that played the Festival.
