Digital Platform ‘The Gleaners and I’ Brings Agnès Varda to Next Generation of Filmmakers

After nearly two years of planning, the digital platform “The Gleaners and I: Revisiting Agnès Varda’s Edit” is about to go live.

Supported by Martin Scorsese, the pedagogical platform will open the treasure trove of Agnès Varda’s archives, making never-before-seen footage and hours of unused rushes available to nascent filmmakers across the globe. Through “The Gleaners and I,” students at participating universities will be able to re-edit and completely rethink Varda’s 2000 documentary of the same name — pooling from 62 hours of rushes, all subtitled in English – under the proviso that each new clip edit be uploaded back on to the platform.

“Agnès would have surely loved the idea of having her work live on in this way,” says daughter and project leader Rosalie Varda. “She would want to give the students full freedom – and that’s what we’ve done. Participants can really reconceive the work however they see fit. We offer to film students the possibility to understand the creative process behind Agnès’ film which was selected at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.”

“With the rushes, each student could create a new sequence, a different exercise or even a whole other documentary. At the same time, the platform offers a great pedagogical tool for editing, sound mixing, documentary writing and directing by allowing students to compare their work to Agnès’ film.”

The project was born of a prompt from longtime Agnès Varda friend and admirer Martin Scorsese, who asked what would become of the late filmmaker’s digital archives. Indeed, Varda was rarely without a Mini-DV camera since 1999, leaving a wealth of memory cards and materials that the directors’ children Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy have indexed and archived with the technical participation and support of l’INA – the French national audiovisual archive.

Focused on Varda’s documentary “The Gleaners and I”, the educational project will be available to all through an official website, while special login instructions will be sent to partnering universities and film schools for their registered students. Ciné-Tamaris has already secured a partnership with La Fémis and will now start reaching out to US universities.

“This hasn’t been done before,” says Varda. “I can’t think of another educational project that would give emerging filmmakers access to another filmmaker’s archives in order to reflect on documentary film writing and come up with their own interpretation to create something new. For the moment, we need similar freedom to see where this project might go.”