Screening: L'opéra Mouffe and Saute ma ville

Join us for a short film double feature at the Institute of Modern Art to complement our current exhibition Confronting Femininity, curated by Sal Edwards and Robert Leonard.

Agnès Varda, L’opéra-mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman), 1958.

Pregnant with her first child, director Agnès Varda turned her camera on her own neighbourhood, capturing everyday life along the Rue Mouffetard. This mostly silent film employs experimental techniques that demonstrate Varda’s unconventional approach to filmmaking. Structured like a dreamlike poem, it moves between intimate scenes of young lovers, surreal and disturbing imagery serving as metaphors for pregnancy, and documentary footage of street life. The film’s distinctly feminine lens shapes its construction, grounding abstract themes of creation in the embodied experience of expectant motherhood. Within 17 minutes, Varda explores cycles of life — childhood, youth, old age, frailty, death — not chronologically, but in the disorienting way we move through life.

Duration: 17 minutes.

Language: French with English subtitles.

Chantal Akerman, Saute ma ville, 1968. 13 mins.

Akerman’s provocative debut short film – its title meaning roughly “blow up my town” – detonates expectations of domestic femininity. At just 18 years old, having abandoned film school INSAS after a mere three months, Chantal Akerman wrote, directed and performed in Saute ma ville. Shot on 16mm film, she embodies a young woman returning to a cramped apartment, ostensibly to tidy and prepare a meal, but whose behaviour grows progressively frenzied, violently upending the household routine. Created in 1968 using borrowed equipment from the school, the short remained trapped in the film lab for two years until Akerman could afford its release.

Duration: 13 minutes.

Language: French with English subtitles.

Spaces are limited. Booking recommended.