Documenteur

Emilie lives in grey, rainy Los Angeles with her son Martin and wanders around like a ghost. She finds no inner calm in the big city mosaic and feels the pain of loneliness. DOCUMENTEUR is a self-portrait of the director covered with thin veil of fictionalization that tells the story of Emilie and Martin’s existence in deliberately fragmentary form: instead of some overarching plot, Varda presents scattered episodes held together by a lyrical voiceover in which her fictional protagonists melt into the real locations and extras. Already the title of this film, which was made in parallel to Murs Murs, suggests that it will wander the boundary between fiction and documentary: “menteur” means “liar” in French. Colleen Kennedy-Karpat (Ankara) explores how Varda dealt with mothehod in this film and others.