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 On Cinema
-
Light Years: Lucrecia Martel and the ...
Directed by Manuel Abramovich • Documentary • With Lucrecia Martel • 2017 • 75 minutes
An illustration of filmmaking’s many stages — mysterious, delirious, playful, frustrated — and complex artistic collaboration with its subject, Manuel Abramovich’s new film concerns Lucrecia Martel during the ...
-
A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Father: S...
Directed by Fatou Cissé • Documentary • With Souleymane Cissé, Martin Scorsese, Costa-Gavras, Baba Diop • 2022 • 73 minutes
A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Father: Souleymane Cissé is the story of a filmmaker as told by his daughter. Through interviews with his friends, family, and collaborators, th...
-
Prism
Directed by Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam • Documentary • 2021 • 78 minutes
Is the technology of photography and motion pictures inherently racist?
For PRISM, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Rosine Mbakam, from Cameroon, and Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Fas...
1 Comment