Documenteur

Agnès Varda's 1982 drama follows Émilie, a young French woman in Los Angeles who has separated from the father of her eight-year-old son, Martin. She works as a secretary for a screenwriter and searches for a place to live, furnishing an apartment with objects recovered from the street. Mother and son navigate a culture and language that are not their own, a displacement that surfaces in the people Émilie observes and in fragments of a past relationship. She devotes herself to her son while typing by the ocean.

Varda wrote and directed the film, the seventh of the fourteen features she directed in chronological order, following Mur Murs and preceding Vagabond. Sabine Mamou plays Émilie, Mathieu Demy plays Martin, and Lisa Blok-Linson, Tina Odom, Gary Feldman and Charles Southwood appear in supporting roles. The production, credited to Ciné-Tamaris, was made in the United States and France and runs sixty-five minutes.

The film holds a rating of 6.6 out of 10 on TMDB from 58 votes, a modest but positive figure that suggests a small, appreciative audience rather than a wide one. It belongs to the period when Varda was living and working in California.