Vagabond

Agnès Varda's Vagabond (French: Sans toit ni loi, literally Without Roof or Law) won the Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985. It was the first French-language film to take the top prize at Venice in over a decade, and one of the most decisive recognitions of Varda's career. It also won the FIPRESCI Prize at the same festival, and Sandrine Bonnaire took the César Award for Best Actress at the 1986 ceremony, beating Anémone in Le Mioche and Isabelle Huppert in Sac de noeuds.

Bonnaire was eighteen when the film was shot. She had broken through three years earlier in Maurice Pialat's To Our Loves, which had won the César for Most Promising Actress, and Vagabond confirmed her as one of the most accomplished young French screen actresses of the 1980s. The supporting cast, among them Macha Méril as the philosopher-tree expert, Stéphane Freiss and Yolande Moreau, appears mainly in the testimonial interviews that structure the film. Patrick Blossier was the cinematographer.

Varda shot largely in the Hérault département, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France, during the real winter of 1985, conditions she chose to mirror the central character's worsening physical state. She spoke openly in interviews about the film's structural debt to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane: the reconstruction through testimony is modelled directly on Kane's biographical investigation. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list.