Agnès Varda

Born Arlette Varda in Belgium in 1928, she became Agnès and moved through photography into film at a moment when sound equipment chained most directors to soundstages. Her 1955 debut La Pointe Courte used location shooting and non-professional actors, methods rare enough in fifties France to mark her as strange. Cléo from 5 to 7 followed in 1962, then decades of narrative features like Vagabond - which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1985 - and documentaries from Black Panthers in 1968 to The Gleaners and I in 2000. She kept filming into her eighties: Faces Places earned an Oscar nomination, The Beaches of Agnès traced her own memory, and Varda by Agnès closed the work in 2019, months before she died. Cannes gave her an Honorary Palme d'Or in 2015, the first ever for a woman director; two years later the Academy followed with its own honorary statuette, and she accepted it the way she'd made everything - on her terms, still curious, still looking.