Who is the founding mother of the French New Wave and the director of La Pointe Courte?

Agnès Varda was a Belgian 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.

Varda’s work employed location shooting in an era when the limitations of sound technology made it easier and more common to film indoors, with constructed sets and painted backdrops of landscapes, rather than outdoors, on location.

Varda died from cancer on 29 March 2019 in Paris, at the age of 90. She was buried at Montparnasse Cemetery on 2 April.

Who is the founding mother of the French New Wave and the director of La Pointe Courte?

Belgian-born Varda has been called the mother of the French New Wave. Her first feature, LA POINTE COURTE (1955) – which she wrote and directed with no formal training – is considered to be the film that inspired the movement.

La Pointe Courte (1955) is Varda’s first feature-length film and has been called the first film of the French New Wave, earning Varda her honorary title as its mother.