Varda by Agnès

It's impossible to love cinema without loving Agnès Varda, who essentially invented the cine-selfie in the 24 features and 22 shorts she made between 1955-2019, during which time she also flourished as a photographer and installation artist. Constructed around clips from Varda's oeuvre and anecdotal snippets from public talks, this companion piece to The Beaches of Agnès (2008) has the valedictory grace of someone who knew that their time was up (Varda died at the age of 90 a couple of months after this movie had premiered at Berlin). It's typically impish and acutely self-aware, but there's nothing mawkish or calculatingly revisionist about this honest assessment of the works produced during the analogue and digital phases of a 60-year career. Indeed, she is at her most revealing in refusing to apologise to Sandrine Bonnaire for the harsh treatment she meted out to the then-17 year-old newcomer while making Vagabond (1985) and in shrugging off the failure One Hundred and One Nights (1995). Varda was a one-off and we'll not see her like again. Treasure her.