Varda’s most overtly feminist film, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t follows the lives of two very different women over the course of two decades: Pomme, a middle-class rebel whose singing career coincides with her radicalization and Suzanne, a young working-class mother whose financial hardships bring about her activism. Out of their friendship, Varda crafts a buoyant portrait of French feminism in the 1970s, capturing the optimism and energy of the moment. While the utopian period captured by the film has surely passed, the delicacy of Varda’s approach renders the film a timeless and poignant reminder of an age past.

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 divorceé 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 the her sense of loss and loneliness. Varda blurs the line between fiction and documentary by incorporating elements from her L.A. documentary Mur murs and by casting her own son, Mathieu, a practice she would repeat, most notably in Kung Fu Master.