Directed by Esther Hoffenberg • Documentary • With Bernadette Lafont, Bulle Ogier • 2016 • 66 minutes
Sex symbol, feminist icon, devoted mother: French actress Bernadette Lafont was a multi-faceted performer, who refused to be boxed into one role.
In BERNADETTE LAFONT: AND GOD CREATED THE FREE WOMAN, director Esther Hoffenberg tells Lafont’s story through carefully selected film clips spanning her career — from iconic roles in the New Wave films of Truffaut and Chabrol, to her award-winning turn in Paulette, playing a drug-dealing grandmother.
The documentary features extensive interviews with Lafont, and with her colleagues and lifelong friends Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon. Hoffenberg also films Lafont’s granddaughters, sharing memories as they look through memorabilia and screen film clips in the rural home where they and Lafont all grew up.
“I’m not just a sex object,” Lafont says on a TV talk show, in a particularly telling moment. The male host tells her it’s “delightful to have a pretty smiling face” on the program, and that famous smile fades. Rebellious by nature, Lafont constantly reinvented herself, subverting expectations. Hoffenberg captures the way her cinematic and personal evolution mirror each other, and how they reflect the broader movement for women’s liberation.
Up Next in Biography
-
The Trials of Henry Kissinger
Directed by Eugene Jarecki • Documentary • With Henry Kissinger, Brian Cox, Amy Goodman, Alexander Haig, William Safire, Seymour Hersh • 2002 • 80 minutes
Featuring previously unseen footage, de-classified documents, and revealing interviews with Kissinger supporters (Alexander Haig, Brent Scowc...
-
Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge
Directed by Marie Noëlle • Drama • With Charles Berling; Karolina Gruszka • 2017 • 100 minutes
The most turbulent five years in the life of a genius woman: Between 1905, where Marie Curie comes with Pierre Curie to Stockholm to be awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the radioactivity an...
-
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 74 minutes
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her ...
1 Comment