Agnès Varda, director of more than twenty-five films since 1954, combines three separate films into one thought-provoking, utterly charming cinematic essay on photography, memory, and the artistic process. In Ydessa, the Bears and Etc . . . (2004, 44 mins), Varda visits an art curator who displays only photographs of people holding teddy bears, thereby creating a world where seemingly everyone is-at least for a moment-happy and beloved. With Ulysse (1983, 22 mins), Varda interviews the subjects of a photograph she took nearly three decades earlier. Now, neither of her subjects can remember being photographed, nor relate to her own memories of it. The final short, Salut les Cubains (1963, 30 mins), narrated by Michel Piccoli, echoes further with faded memories and lost time-an animated collection of photographs Varda took on her 1963 visit to Cuba, it reveals individuals alive with hope for the future, a future that now, as we watch the film forty years later, is far behind them. “I became fascinated by the inert photo that comes to life when we look at it,” Varda writes; spanning a lifetime of reflections on how art affects our lives, and how our lives affect art, Cinévardaphoto spins the personal into the political and individual musings into universal wonders.