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 — 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. The film also won the FIPRESCI Prize at the same festival and earned Sandrine Bonnaire the César Award for Best Actress at the 1986 ceremony, beating Anémone in Le Mioche and Isabelle Huppert in Sac de noeuds.

The lead, Sandrine Bonnaire, was eighteen at the time of shooting; she had broken through three years earlier in Maurice Pialat's To Our Loves, which had won the César for Most Promising Actress. Vagabond consolidated her position as one of the most accomplished young French screen actresses of the 1980s. The supporting cast — Macha Méril (the philosopher-tree expert), Stéphane Freiss and Yolande Moreau — appears principally in the testimonial-interview vignettes that structure the film. Cinematography is by Patrick Blossier.

The film was shot largely in the Hérault département in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France during the actual winter of 1985, in conditions Varda chose to mirror the central character's deteriorating physical state. Varda has been outspoken in interviews about the structural debt to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with the testimonial-interview reconstruction directly modelled on Kane's biographical-investigation approach. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list.