The Gleaners and I (2000), Directed by Agnès Varda

Free, booking essential
This film is unclassified
Film duration: 82 mins

Celebrate women artists and directors with the free screening of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I in connection with the National Gallery exhibition Deep inside my heart.

An award-winning documentary from renowned French filmmaker Agnès Varda, The Gleaners and I explores the history and contemporary practice of gleaning – historically, the process of collecting remnant wheat in fields after harvest. In doing so, drawing inspiration from Jean-François Millet’s 1857 oil painting The Gleaners (Des Glaneuses), Varda interrogates political and ethical questions of poverty and gender in contemporary France. Varda makes herself present in the film, in keeping with the characteristically autobiographical nature of her filmmaking style.

Deep inside my heart brings together key works from the national collection by major women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring representations of the figure across sculpture, drawing and related disciplines. Featuring work by Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Ana Mendieta, Lynda Benglis, Marlene Dumas, Kiki Smith, Bronwyn Oliver, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, the exhibition focuses on a key period of the 1980s when representations of the body were used to assert politics, gender and identity.

The exhibition curator, Lucina Ward (Senior Curator, International Art) will provide a brief introduction to the exhibition at the start of the film.

Deep inside my heart is on display from 25 Nov 2023 – 19 May 2024.

Art Meets Film is a free program of film screenings presented in partnership by the National Gallery of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.