Jacquot de Nantes

Jacques Demy, who made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was dying when his wife Agnès Varda began filming his childhood. He wrote the memories down; she staged them; he was on set. He died in October 1990, before the film was finished. It is the most extraordinary act of collaboration in French cinema and it is almost never discussed as one.

Three young actors play Jacquot at successive ages in the garage in Nantes where his father repaired cars and his mother worked as a hairdresser. He builds marionette theatres, wangles his way into cinemas, saves for a 9.5mm camera and animates on a table. Varda shoots these passages in a warm black and white, cuts to colour clips from Demy's own later films at the moments they were seeded, and returns repeatedly to a series of extreme close-ups of Demy's hands, his hair, the skin of his shoulder in the sun. Nothing is stated about his illness.

The film was Varda's way of keeping him in the world a little longer, and it is also a serious argument about where a film-maker's images come from — the mechanic's workshop turning up in a musical about a garage, the harbour at Nantes reappearing in Lola. It is the tenderest thing in her filmography, and among the most affecting films ever made about the making of films.