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
-
Hal (a film about Hal Ashby)
Directed by Amy Scott • Documentary • With Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, Haskell Wexler • 2018 • 90 minutes
Although Hal Ashby directed a remarkable string of acclaimed, widely admired classics throughout the 1970s—HAROLD AND MAUDE, THE LAST DETAIL, SHAMPOO, COMING HOME, BEING THERE—he is often ove...
-
Cinema Novo
Directed by Eryk Rocha • Documentary • 2016 • 90 minutes
CINEMA NOVO is a film essay that poetically investigates the eponimous Brazilian film movement, the most prominent in Latin America in the past century, through the analysis of its main auteurs: Nelson Pereira do Santos, Glauber Rocha, Leo...
-
The Cinema Within
Directed by Chad Freidrichs • Documentary • 2025 • 93 minutes
From the director of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth comes a documentary about the psychology of film editing.
Why do film cuts work? Why do people around the world – even children – so effortlessly understand them? In real life we don't instan...
1 Comment