The Gleaners and I
Searching for gleaners who live on discarded food, Agnès Varda comes upon the most remarkable people. A bartender recalls how she used to gather the grain that was left after the harvest, as nothing should be wasted. People visit winegrowers to take home the scraps that weren't gathered during the grape picking. A chef with a Michelin star treats food with great respect and can often be found in the hills, gathering ripe fruit and fresh herbs that he uses in his kitchen the same day. At the same time, potato growers throw away piles of large or malformed spuds while a number of dumpster divers find great food in the trash restaurants thrown away. Varda films them playfully and affectionately, and doesn't mind getting sidetracked when she encounters something interesting. Her delightfully meandering approach turns the film into something of a disguised self-portrait. After all, filming is gleaning, too.
Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928. She studied at the École du Louvre and took evening classes in photography at the École de Vaugirard. She became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon Theater Festival in 1948, then for the Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. She held her first personal exhibition in 1954 in the courtyard of her home. That same year, Agnès Varda made the move to cinema without any formal training. She founded Ciné Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte. She directed short films and features, both fiction and documentaries. In 2003, she began her third career as a visual artist at the Venice Biennale.