Cinévardaphoto

There are few filmmakers with a body of work that encompasses as many different genres and forms as Varda's. Her concern with the import of images resonates throughout all of her films, but in the shorts that she brings together in the trilogy "Cinévardaphoto", we find a direct engagement with photographs and their meanings in different contexts over a period of forty years.
“Ydessa, les ours et etc...” documents Toronto art collector Ydessa Hendeles's Teddy Bear Project, an exhibition of thousands of photographs featuring teddy bears. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who had lost all family memorabilia, Hendeles bought the photos over a period of ten years, finally exhibiting them as a contemporary art experience that addresses the history of the twentieth century. In “Ulysse”, Varda revisits an enigmatic photograph taken in Egypt twenty-eight years earlier. “Salut les Cubains” animates 1500 of the more than four thousand photographs Varda took while vacationing in Cuba. Through montage, she makes the subjects of the photos sing and dance. She calls it Socialism and cha-cha-cha.