“La Pointe Courte announced Varda to a world that wasn’t prepared for her.” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times)

Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complicated marriage (Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret) and a documentary-like look at the daily struggles of the village’s actual residents, Varda’s intelligent, gorgeously-filmed debut was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the French New Wave. It was released to much acclaim, but Varda countered that La Pointe Courte “hit like a cannonball because I was a young woman, since before that, in order to become a director you had to spend years as an assistant.”