Jacquot de Nantes

Varda’s declaration of love to her dying husband, filmmaker Jacques Demy, and a tribute to his cinema. She films Demy’s memories of his childhood and adolescence in Nantes from 1939-1949, reconstructs family scenes at the real locations where they happened, fades in excerpts of his films and from time to time shifts from black and white to color. The chronicle of a happy childhood spent in his father’s car repair shop emerges, with Punch and Judy shows, song, an early passion for cinema, and self-taught attempts at filmmaking. Intimate images of Demy on the beach marked by illness speak tenderly of transience and farewell. Many years later, Varda turned her attention again to the time of the Second World War and returns to the form of evocation by way of blending documentary and fiction that she created for JACQUOT DE NANTES for her installation Hommage aux Justes de France. (bik)