Cléo from 5 to 7 by Agnès Varda (1962)
MAUVAIS GENRES: Columbia Maison Française Film Festival

Fiction, 90 minutes
*In French with English subtitles

The screening will be introduced with messages from Agnès Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda, and Nora Philippe.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the 1960s with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits, from 5 pm to 7 pm, the results of a worrying medical test. A spirited chronicle of these minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7mixes vivid cinéma vérité and melodrama to tell a story of maturation and emancipation. Selected at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963, the film contributed to elevating Varda as a prominent - and feminist - filmmaker in the otherwise all-male Nouvelle Vague movement, and it subtlely questions the roles and clichés a Parisian woman copes with, then and today.

Agnès Varda (1928–2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist. Her pioneering work was central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She directed nearly 30 films and her oeuvre focused on achieving documentary realism, addressing women's issues, and offering other social commentary, using a distinctive experimental style.

To watch the trailer, please click here.

This event is featured as part of the film festival, Mauvais Genres: French Cinema Takes on Gender organized by the Columbia Maison Française and curated by Nora Philippe.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the Maison Française using such video for promotional purposes.