Made during Varda’s brief stay in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, the title is a pun on the French words for documentary (documentaire) and liar (menteur), a juxtaposition that has preoccupied Varda’s filmmaking since the beginning of her career. Tracing the alienation of a recent divorcée newly arrived in L.A. with her young son, Documenteur uses its extensive interior monologue to underscore the woman’s status as an outsider, vividly using Los Angeles to evoke her sense of loss and loneliness. Varda blurs the line between fiction and documentary by incorporating elements from her L.A. document Mur murs and by casting her own son, Mathieu, a practice she would repeat, most notably in Kung Fu Master.