Faces Places

Faces Places (Visages Villages, 2017) is a French documentary co-directed by Agnès Varda and photographer JR — watch it online on iFILM. The two of them drove JR's truck-sized camera across rural France, photographing ordinary people — miners, dock workers, farmers, postal workers — and pasting their faces at enormous scale onto barn walls, grain silos, and cliff faces the same afternoon.

Varda was 88, JR was 34. She was losing her eyesight. He never removed his signature tinted glasses. Their thirty-year age gap and complete difference in working method turned the road trip into something more than a portrait project: a conversation about memory, visibility, and what it means to make a face permanent on a wall that will not stand forever.

The film took the César Award for Best Documentary and landed an Academy Award nomination in the same category. Varda died in 2019, making this one of her final works — and the one that feels most alive. Stream Faces Places (2017) online on iFILM.