Educational Media Reviews Online

Bernadette LaFont, who died in 2013, was a French New Wave film actress. She appeared in over 120 films and worked with many of the well-known French directors such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. She is profiled in the documentary Bernadette LaFont: And God Created the Free Woman.

This documentary was directed by Esther Hoffenberg who also narrates the film. The film follows more or less a trajectory of LaFont’s career and includes many film clips and interviews with her directors (who talk about the films LaFont stars in but don’t actually talk about the actress) and her co-stars along with interviews with her granddaughters and the star herself.

The topic is interesting as a documentary about the film star and tries to show how she was a feminist in her life and in her career. She made choices about the movies she made even when they may not have shown women in the most positive of light. The film showed her as a celebrity throughout her career but didn’t place her role in the context of French cinema. The structure of the film does not always work. The director is the narrator and addresses the audience as if she is reading a letter to LaFont. It’s a contrived method especially given that the actress is later interviewed and does not address the audience in response to the narrator. The narrator speaks as if LaFont is living, most of the interviews in the first part of the film refer to the actress as living, there are historical interviews with the actress throughout her career and then her granddaughters speak of their memories of her. It does not appear that LaFont was interviewed specifically for this documentary.

This documentary is available streaming through Docuseek and by DVD format through Icarus Films. Institutions can receive a license for institutional use. Public performance rights come at an additional cost. The film is in color and black and white and is 66 minutes long. It is in French with English subtitles. One critique of the subtitles is they were very hard to read as it was white text on a mostly black and white background. Bernadette Lafont: And God Created the Free Woman is recommended for film studies classes but one would need to have a deep background of French Cinema to know any of the films that are referenced in this documentary. This is a very niche resource.

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