Movie Review: Faces Places

 

    The documentary "Faces Places" captures street artist JR and Belgian film director Agnes Varda on their journey of capturing France's beauty through its people. Their strategy of completing such a project was to become friends or familiar with the immediate community and the people that they were photographing. This not only gave JR and Varda an insight on what the people were like in each community they visited but it made the project more wholesome and personal. The purpose of their photography project is to bring communities together through the stories that the artworks depicted. JR and Varda visited a former coal-mining town and spoke to a woman named Jennie who seems to be the only one left living in a miner's home which was set to be demolished. After speaking to her and learning of her story along with talking to neighbors from the community and learning the significance of the coal mines to the community, Varda and JR took a headshot of Jennie and put the photo up on the wall of her house along with photos of the miners that once worked and lived there, honoring them, a feat usually reserved for historic, public or influential people. Another strategy used was being spontaneous, JR and Varda didn't plan specific places that they would visit for their project, instead, they traveled in their Inside Outside van, a van that looks like a film camera and took larger than life sized headshots of citizens and pasted them up on the walls or buildings around the community. Varda stated "each face tells a story" and through watching how their project developed and completed, I believe that JR and Varda were successful in telling the stories of each face that they captured because they didn't just captured them, they formed a relationship and listened to the stories that belonged to each face showing the world the beauty they found in your everyday "mundane" community.