On Wednesday, May 21, a sunlit stretch of the Plage du CNC transformed into a hub for cinematic memory and innovation. During this year’s Cannes Film Festival, an extraordinary presentation unveiled a ground-breaking educational initiative: a platform giving film students open access to 54 hours of rushes from Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, 2000), offering them the rare opportunity to edit this material in alignment with their own directorial visions.
The project is spearheaded by Rosalie Varda—daughter of Agnès Varda and head of production company Ciné-Tamaris—and was made possible thanks to a robust network of partners including the CNC, INA, Villa Albertine, Netflix, CHANEL, the Cinémathèque Française, Institut Lumière, ArteKino, mk2 Films, the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This initiative is nothing short of historic. As both Laurent Vallet, president of INA, and CNC director general Olivier Henrard emphasised in their opening remarks, no school has ever been granted access to the entirecorpus of rushes from a completed documentary. Typically, students are allowed to work with footage from one or two selected scenes. But in this case, they can explore a vast 54-hour archive—an act of cinematic generosity and pedagogical vision.
Rosalie Varda, speaking with warmth and conviction on stage, described the platform as “a tool to discover the very meaning of cinema and documentary,” bridging generations by allowing students to engage with her mother’s work directly. “It is,” she said, “an encounter between technology, image, and poetry.”
Thomas Monteil, project manager at INA, provided an overview of the platform’s functionality. Developed in collaboration with INA, the platform offers students a searchable interface with advanced sorting capabilities. Users can browse hundreds of clips by keyword or phrase, download them in high or low resolution, and use an integrated personal workspace that supports collaborative feedback and annotations. Clips are available with English subtitles and the entire platform interface is bilingual, making the project globally accessible.
As the sea shimmered behind the stage, attendees watched a brief clip showcasing the platform’s capabilities, before the event shifted to its emotional core: the screening of three shorts edited by students from Columbia University and the City University of New York (CUNY). These works offered new interpretations of Varda’s footage, ranging from personal essays to poetic montages.
The discussion that followed was moderated by Variety chief critic Peter Debruge, who opened with a tribute to Agnès Varda’s singular career. “She anticipated the French New Wave,” he remarked, “but always remained a constellation of her own—working with limited means and a galaxy brain and the soul of a poet.”
The roundtable included Columbia professor Behrang Garakani and students Grace Hecht, Andrea De Bedout and Hanna Sutherland. Garakani described the project as both a pedagogical experiment and a creative lab. “I try to teach my students cinema like Robert Bresson did—through its own language,” he explained. “Here, they weren’t adapting existing essays, as they usually do in my video essay labs. They started from nothing—just the rushes—and had to build their vision from the ground up.”
For the students, the experience was truly transformative.
Grace Hecht shared how her film explored the essence of Varda through what she chose not to include in her final cut. “It’s a privilege to learn who she was through the things she left out,” she said. “It’s poetic—just like her films. My first introduction to Varda came during a documentary class. Coming back to her this way feels like a full-circle moment.”
Hanna Sutherland admitted that she wasn’t very familiar with Varda before this project. The Gleaners and Iwas the first of her films she had seen. “What struck me most,” she said, “was just how much footage there is. You get to see her process—what she kept, what she cut—and understand how prolific she was.”
Andrea De Bedout, who wrote her college application about Varda, noted that working with the rushes was deeply personal. “There are so many clips where she films the ground and just keeps talking,” she said.
All three students reflected on the porous boundary between fiction and documentary in Varda’s work. “She turns the act of directing into an acting performance,” said Hecht. “By choosing what to show, she becomes an actor in her own story.” Andrea added that she took inspiration from Varda’s methods and created a desktop documentary, complete with a custom website. “It’s about turning images into data—gleaning from the interface itself.”
Garakani closed the discussion by speaking candidly about the process. “This was a voluntary project. At times it felt like they were lost. But I kept telling them: let the footage speak to you. Something will emerge. And it did. That’s how cinema works.”
The initiative’s public-facing website, now invites everyone to discover this unprecedented educational tool, a collaboration that honours the past while opening up infinite future possibilities.
