"The Beaches of Agnès", this retrospective show is an unmissable occasion to discover the different faces of the 83 years old artist in perpetual creation. This retrospective exhibition will be held in Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai.

UCCA will host the film of this retrospective exhibition. From March 3rd to March 11th, 6 of her essential works will be screened in prints in the UCCA art cinema. Works including: Cleo from 5 to 7, The Beaches of Agnès, Without Roof No Law, Jacquot de Nantes, The Gleaners and I, and several short films.

March 10 Varda Shorts Films will be presented by Madame Agnès Varda. She will also come to UCCA together with previous head editor of Cahiers du Cinémas Jean-Michel-Frodon, and Professor Zhan Xianmin will be invited to UCCA, to share with the audience the creation and experience of art.

*Please visit http://e.mosh.cn/10295 for online ticketing.

March 3 17:30 Jacquot de Nantes
March 4 14:00 Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse
March 4 19:00 Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond)
March 10 16:30 Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7)
March 10 19:00 Varda's short films *Agnès Varda will present for an introduction of this screening
March 11 16:00 Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) *Agnès Varda, Jean-Michel-Frodon, and Zhang Xianmin will present for a talk and Q&A after screening.

Jacquot de Nantes
118 min. 1991. Chinese and English subtitles.
Once upon a time a boy was brought up in a garage where everyone liked to sing. It was 1939, he was 8, and he liked puppets and operettes. Then he wanted to make films, but his father made him study mechanics. It is a film about Jacques DEMY ‘s youth, his games and pains, his first attempts to make films… This was a happy childhood, despite war and the post-war period. The story of JACQUOT who had a vocation, was filmed by the woman who shared his life since 1958.

Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (THE GLEANERS AND I)
82 min. 1999/2000. Chinese and English subtitles
Here and there in France, Agnès has come across gleaners, foragers, rummages and scavengers. Through necessity, purely by chance or out of choice, these people pick up left-over items discarded by others. Their world is a surprising one. It is a far from the world of yesterday gleaners, peasant women who rummaged for bits of wheat left after the harvest. Potatoes, apples, discarded foodstuffs, things without owners, clocks without hands are the fare of today's gleaners. But Agnès herself is just as much a gleaner. And her documentary is subjective. There's no age limit to curiosity. Filming itself is gleaning.

Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond)
105 min.1985. Chinese and English subtitles
In winter in the South of France, a young woman is found frozen in a ditch. She's ill kempt, a vagabond. Through flashbacks and brief interviews, we trace her final weeks, as she camps alone or falls in with various men and women, many of whom project their needs onto her or try to give her life direction. She squats in an old house smoking hash with a man, falls for a Tunisian laborer and works beside him pruning grape vines. Through other encounters, and some help that she refuses, she pushes herself to be more and more alone and silent. At the end of the story the cold weather catches her.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7)
90 min. 1962. Chinese and English subtitles.
Cleo from 5 to 7 (Cleo de cinq a sept), concentrates on two hours in the life of a woman. Those hours are desperate ones, in that Cleo, a pop singer, awaits the results of her tests for cancer. Director Agnes Varda stages the film in "real" rather than subjective time, its various episodes divided into chapters, using significant Tarot cards. During the allotted time, Cleo visits her friends, tries to sing her worries away, spends money, and cries.

Varda tous Courts (Varda's short films)
133 min. Chinese and English subtitles.

-Coasting along the coast (1958) 26 min
A documentary rides down the Riviera: exotic sights, holiday hues, and shades of the Carnival and the Eden; an island, and a final shot of parasols closing to a beautiful Delerue song.

-Uncle Yanco(1967) 18 min
This is a portrait-report about the painter Jean Varda, her uncle. In the aquatic suburbs of San Francisco, intellectual center and bohemia’s heart, he sails with a Latin boat and paints celestial and byzantine cities, since he is Greek. Nevertheless, he is involved in young American movements, hippies and drop outs come to see him in his house-boat. How she discovered her American uncle and how marvelous is the man: that’s what we see in this colored short.

-Hi there, Cubanos(1962-63) 28 min
Four years after Fidel Castro came to power; Agnes Varda brought back from Cuba 1,800 photos and used them to make a didactic and amusing documentary.

-One minute for one image (1983) 26 min
This documentary is about 170 famous photos and Varda’s comments about these photos. At the end of the image, the documentary will give the name of the photographer.

-You’ve got beautiful stairs, you know… (1986) 3 min
How, in 150 seconds, can you pay tribute to the French films, which is 50 years old without filming the 50 steps which lead up to the Musée du Cinéma and down to the silver screen on which are projected master-pieces with famous flights of stairs.

-The Mac Donald bridge fiancés (1961) 5 min
This silent burlesque short was incorporated into Varda's full-length "Cleo de 5 a 7", although in a slightly different version. A young man has a dark view of life when he wears his dark glasses. Once he removes them, things get better.

-Seven rooms, kitchen and bath (1984) 27 min
An unusual visit to a large, empty apartment… Is it empty or not? Maybe a family has lived there or is going to live there… Maybe a young girl is going to escape from there… Maybe some of the old-timers who lived there have never left… The walls themselves tell the stories of the time passing by…

Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès)
110 min. 2008/2008. Chinese and English subtitles
Returning to the beaches which have been parts of her life, Varda invents a kind of self-portrait-documentary. Agnès stages herself among excerpts of her films, images and reportages. She shares with humor and emotion her beginnings as stage photographer, then early filmmaker of the French New Wave, her life with Jacques Demy, her feminism, her trips to Cuba, China and the USA, her life as independent producer and her family. A free and curious woman!

Agnès Varda
Born in 1928 in Ixelles (Brussels) Agnes Varda spent her childhood in Belgium with her 4 brothers and sisters. In 1940, due to the war, the family moved to the south of France. She spent her teenage in Sètes, then Paris, Baccalaureat, where she studied at the famous institution Ecole du Louvre and also the Vaugirard School in the photography department. Since 1951, Agnès Varda has been living in Paris, Rue Daguerre. She began with a photographic career in 1949 and joined the Avignon Festival at the request of Jean Vilar and the Theatre National Populaire where Gérard Philippe was a central figure.
She held her first solo show in the courtyard of her house, then accomplished several photo reports, including China and Cuba. Along her trips and encounters she photographed anonymous characters and also famous figures of the time.
In 1954, she shifted to cinema without any training. She launched Cine Tamaris company to produce and direct her first film La Pointe Courte. Later on, she will be considered and named as the New Wave Grandmother.
Her most famous works include Cleo from 5 to 7, The Happiness, Without Roof No Law (Golden Lion Venice Mostra 1985), Jacquot de Nantes, The Gleaners and I.

Jean-Michel-Frodon
French film critic and historian of cinema. He was a journalist and film critic for the Le Point, Le Monde, and became the head editor of Cahiers du Cinémas from 2003 to 2009. He is also a writer, works including: L'Age Moderne du Cinéma francais: de la Nouvelle Vague aux nos Jours, La Projection Nationale, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Conversation avec Woody Allen, Le Cinema D’Edward Yang, etc.

Zhang Xianmin
Professor at Beijing Film Academy
1985 graduated from Beijing Foreign Languages University, China
1987 graduated from Paris Sorbonne III, France
since 1987 Teacher at Beijing Film Academy
1992 graduated from FEMIS, France

Partner: French Embassy