CHRISTIE PITS Park
Sunday, august 16, 2026

Faces Places (Visages Villages)

With the short films Madeleine and Detours Ahead

In her final feature film before her death in 2019, French cinema icon and Octogenarian Agnès Varda teams up with photographer and street artist JR – 55 years her junior – for an unlikely but delightful creative collaboration. Varda and JR’s co-directed documentary Faces Places (Visages Villages) is partially an odd couple road movie and partially a rolling dialogue on art, community, history, and aging. Driving from town to town across rural France in a custom van turned photobooth, the duo works with locals on large-scale photo paste-ups that turn ordinary structures like barns and shipping containers into massive artistic canvases. Never content to merely document, Varda and JR incorporate animation, music, archival footage, and reenactments to invite us to join their whimsical journey to capture the heart of everyday life. As one of the last screenings in this summer’s Going Places programme, Faces Places is a fitting tribute to a filmmaker who dedicated her life to cinema and the younger generations she continues to inspire.

Brazilian-Canadian filmmaker Raquel Sancinetti’s charming short Madeleine similarly combines documentary and animation to explore a cross-generational relationship between the filmmaker and her sassy 107-year-old friend Madeleine. Their playful banter reveals a deep connection, and Sancinetti’s stunning stop-motion animation allows the duo to take imaginary trips beyond the confines of Madeleine’s room. Vancouver-based animator Esther Cheung’s lyrical short film Detours Ahead uses a drive through different seasons of life to metaphorically articulate the many twists, turns, and detours on the long road from grief to acceptance.