AFI Fest: Agnes Varda to serve as guest artistic director

Pioneering French film director Agnes Varda will serve as guest artistic director at AFI Fest 2013, which takes place Nov. 7-14 in Hollywood.

Varda, 85, will present a program of films that have inspired her work during the festival. Details of her program will be announced later in September.

Varda is considered to be a key influence on France’s New Wave movement that began in the late 1950s with such young filmmakers as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

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Varda actually began making her own films before the New Wave officially began. She formed her own film production company in 1954. The following year she wrote and directed her first feature, the low-budget drama “La Pointe Courte.”

Varda has made more than 30 films over the last six decades, including such acclaimed dramas as 1962’s “Cleo from 5 to 7,” 1965’s “Le Bonheur,” 1985’s “Vagabond” and personal documentaries such as 2000’s “The Gleaners and I” and 2008’s “The Beach of Agnes,” for which she won the Cesar Award for best documentary.

Varda was married to director Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”), who also came to fame during the New Wave. The year after Demy died, she wrote and directed the 1991 bio-pic “Jacquot de Nantes,” which explored his life from childhood through his 30s.

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Of late, Varda has been concentrating on video installations and photography.

“I want to investigate,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “I want to discover. You don’t ask a novelist to make books of 220 pages all the time. Installations, I really believe are another step in investigating what is image and sound.”

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