At 89, French director Varda in running for second Oscar
PARIS/NEW YORK, (Reuters) - A few months shy of her 90th birthday, French film director Agnes Varda is in the running for a second Oscar in a year, thanks to an unlikely partnership with street artist JR in a documentary spotlighting everyday life in smalltown France.
Varda - a leading light of the French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 1960s and a contemporary of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard - won an honorary Oscar last November for her career, which includes “Cleo from 5 to 7” and “The Gleaners and I”.
With “Faces Places”, the director has now been jointly nominated with 35-year-old JR for best feature documentary. If it takes the prize, she will be the oldest person to win an Oscar in a competitive category.
For the film, the duo drove round little-known corners of France in a truck disguised as a giant photo booth, photographing residents and pasting the results on a grand scale on everything from walls to shipping containers.
The local postman, the wives of dockers, a lonely farmer: the stars of the movie are all people without power, Varda told Reuters in her garden in Paris.
“Andy Warhol said everyone should have a moment of fame... We’re telling people that they are important: they’re important for us, they’re important in the film, they’re important for you watching,” she said.
Varda described her and JR as like Laurel and Hardy.
Her co-director is known for his black and white pictures displayed in public, which recently included the giant head of a baby peering over Mexico’s border wall with the United States.
“Whether or not we win, the fact that we’re together, that we’re seeing it together, that we’re going for the first time for her and the first time for me too, I think that’s great,” JR said of the Oscars from his New York studio. PARIS, (Reuters) - Over 100 actresses and film professionals in France, including Vanessa Paradis and Diane Kruger, launched their own movement on Wednesday against sexual violence, and said they would sport white ribbons at a French awards event this week.
Hot on the heels of Hollywood’s “Time’s Up” campaign against harassment, France’s “Now we act” is billed as an appeal to raise funds so that women who have suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence can take legal action.
The French appeal also comes after veteran actress Catherine Deneuve and 99 other French women caused a stir last month by saying a backlash against men following the Harvey Weinstein scandal had gone too far.
The signatories backing the new fundraising appeal, published in the Liberation newspaper on Wednesday, include actresses Clemence Poesy, Julie Gayet, Kruger - who is German-American but lives partly in France - and author Leila Slimani.
Campaigns against sexual harassment in the workplace and elsewhere have taken off across the world in recent months.