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Agnès Varda Forever FOREVER Festival 2025 Trailer
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Agnès Varda ForeverPublic admiration posters + festivalPortland, Oregon2021—present
Agnès Varda Forever was over 500 posters that said “Agnès Varda Forever” and were hung on utility poles, bulletin boards, and other public places in Portland, Oregon. They expressed admiration for Agnès Varda, a French film director, artist, and writer. Detachable tabs are the bottom of the poster listed the title of one of her many films and a one-sentence description. The project continues as a film festival every other year at the Clinton Street Theater.

The project began in the summer of 2020 after JJ and her son watched a marathon of movies directed by Varda. Acting on a desire for more people to know about the “mother” of French New Wave cinema, JJ painted “AGNÈS VARDA FOREVER” in eight-inch tall letters on the utility pole at the end of her street in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

I commissoned her to continue the project, offering her $100 to do so, which she accepted. We collaborated on the design and production of a poster that reproduced the handpainted “AGNÈS VARDA FOREVER” message at a smaller scale. Each poster featured removable tabs listing a movie by Varda and a short description. There was no contact information or anything related to our identities on the posters. JJ hung five hundred copies of the poster in public places all over Portland and beyond. The poster is available to download and we’ve seen documentation of the poster hanging in places ranging from Laredo, Texas, to Bogotá, Colombia, to New York City and Los Angeles.

After our identities were revealed during an interview with the Hollywood Theatre, Portland’s Clinton Street Theater invited us to create an Agnès Varda Forever film festival in August 2021. During the festival, we were artists in residence of the theater and arranged artist talks to precede screenings of Varda’s films and organized participatory art projects in the theater and surrounding neighborhood. We screened Cléo from 5 to 7, Lions Love (... and Lies), One Sings, the Other Doesn't, Vagabond, and The Gleaners and I. Like any other film festival, ours offered merch!

Early in 2022, Gina Altamura from Holocene (a Portland music and arts venue, nightclub and events space) invited us to collaborate on Fin de Cinema, a recurring live film score series she's curated since 2009. Together with Nora Colie of POW Film Fest, we commissioned Portland-based musicians, EMA (Erika M. Anderson) and Kathy Foster with Rachel Blumberg to write and perform a new soundtrack to Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte, with Anderson composing for the first half of the film and Foster and Blumberg for the second.

The 2023 Agnès Varda Forever Festival was at the Clinton Street Theater every Monday in March. We showed some of our favorite Varda films: Le Bonheur, Daguerréotypes, Mur Murs, and The Beaches of Agnès. In June 2023, Movies in the Alley invited us to screen Faces Places for people living in Portland’s Sullivan’s Gulch area. Each attendee had the option to have their portrait made with a Polaroid-type camera and added to a display of the “faces” of the neighborhood. This created our own local and ephemeral “Faces Places” in the moment.

In March 2025, we celebrated Women’s History Month with our pals at the Clinton Street Theater for the third Agnès Varda Forever Festival. Programmed by JJ and Aaron Colter, we showed six films by Varda over four days: La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, Jacquot of Nantes, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, The Gleaners and I, Faces Places, selected short films by Varda, and 5-minutes or less films inspired by Varda made by local Portland people. 

We are grateful for the media coverage of our project since 2021:
The Franklin Post
Hello, Rose City
The Kick Podcast
Hollywood Theatre interview
Willamette Week’s “Best of Portland”
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Portland Monthly
I-5 Cinemabound podcast  

Our film festivals are documented through programs that were distributed to attendees and are available to download for you, too:
2021
2023
2025

To promote the festivals and explain the project, I made a series of videos:
Dear Agnès Varda
2025 Trailer
2023 Trailer
Agnès Varda Forever Festival 2021: How It Ended
2021 Trailer
It Started as a Sign and Now It's a Festival! How the Agnès Varda Forever Project Began

Just like any other film festival, ours includes commemorative merchandise:
Shirts
Tote bags
Can coolers
Lick and stick stamp sheets (featuring artwork created especially for us by Shelbie Loomis! All proceeds are donated to Portland Oregon Women's Film Festival)



©2025Laura Glazer@helloprettycity
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