Agnès Varda to Receive IDA Pioneer Award

LOS ANGELES, October 9, 2002-Agnès Varda will receive the International Documentary Association (IDA) Pioneer Award for distinguished lifetime achievements. The presentation will be made on December 13 during the 18th Annual IDA Awards Gala Benefit at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in Hollywood.

"The Pioneer Award is presented to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to advancing the non-fiction form," says IDA President Michael Donaldson. "Agnès Varda has earned the admiration of peers. Her documentaries are brave, personal interactions that reveal the filmmaker as well as the subject. She is a terrific example of how a filmmaker can use the camera to interface with her subjects as well as documenting human interaction."

Varda, a native of Belgium, has been called the grandmother of the New Wave. She has compiled more than 30 film credits. Her career was the subject of recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as well as the American Cinematheque.

Varda employed her skills as a photojournalist in her first documentary project, La Pointe Courte (1956). It is widely considered a precursor to the French New Wave subsequently championed by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. "I had the feeling," she said, "that the cinema was not free, above all in its form, and that annoyed me. I wanted to make a film exactly as one writes a novel."

Her fiction films Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7), Le Bonheur (Happiness), and (L'Une Chante, l'Autre Pas) One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1976) are revered as feminist experiments in breaking the boundaries of subject and form that brought a documentary aesthetic and techniques to the dramatic genre. Varda's instinctive and skillful approach to documentary storytelling resulted in such films as Jacquot, a portrait of her late husband, filmmaker Jacques Demy (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and such stunningly compelling short films as l'Opéra Mouffe and Salut les Cubains)

In one of her best known documentaries, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners & I), Varda examines the ancient practice of foraging for wheat left after the harvest as a way to open a chronicle focusing on hungry people who subsist on what others leave behind. She likens filmmaking to gleaning and claims solidarity with the scavengers who live on the outside the boundaries of society.

"I've always been interested in precariousness," she says. "This film is a document of my interactions. I speak with the subjects while I film them... What I want to do is involve each person in the audience, which I do by being involved myself."

In 2002, Varda made a follow-up film in which she tracked down some of the subjects of the original film and asked whether their situations had changed.

"The films created by Agnès Varda speak a universal language which have touched people in every part of the world," says IDA Executive Director Sandra Ruch. "She has succeeded in a very difficult and competitive field through a combination of perseverance, skill and talent. She has blazed a trail for many other filmmakers who were inspired and encouraged by her success."

The IDA is celebrating 20 years of the documentary. The non-profit organization has more than 2,500 members in some 50 countries. For information about the Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards and other programs and services call 213-534-3600 or visit the IDA website at www.documentary.org.