DOCUMENTEUR

Agnès Varda’s DOCUMENTEUR follows a French woman living in Los Angeles with her young son, drifting between temporary homes and trying to piece together a sense of stability after a separation. The film unfolds through fragments of daily life, voiceover, and observation, building a portrait of loneliness that is tied to place, language, and dislocation.

Shot alongside Varda’s documentary MUR MURS, the film sits somewhere between fiction and lived experience. It draws on Varda’s own life, but resists autobiography in a conventional sense, instead focusing on the texture of time, memory, and emotional distance. Los Angeles is not presented as a backdrop but as something felt, empty, expansive, and difficult to belong to.

DOCUMENTEUR offers a quiet but exact study of solitude, motherhood, and the effort required to rebuild a life when nothing feels anchored. The title is also a pun. “Documenteur” combines documentaire(documentary) and menteur (liar). By choosing to call her film DOCUMENTEUR, Varda is asking us - the viewer - whether any documentary can ever be fully "true".