About Faces Places
The eighty-eight-year-old godmother of the French New Wave and the thirty-three-year-old graffiti photographer JR pile into his portable photo-booth truck and drive around rural France pasting enormous black-and-white portraits of the people they meet onto the sides of barns, shipping containers, and abandoned coal-mining cottages.
Released in 2017 and running a tight 1h 29m, Faces Places sits firmly in the documentary tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated PG and presented in French, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Agnès Varda, JR
Agnès Varda, JR belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Faces Places is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Agnès Varda, JR currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Agnès Varda, JR — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Faces Places
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Portland, OR — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- San Antonio, TX — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Chicago, IL — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- San Francisco, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Gilroy, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Park City, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Big Bear Lake, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Williamstown, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Philadelphia, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Mooresville, NC — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Faces Places is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 29m documentary work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Documentary genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.