The Gleaners and I is a 2000 French documentary film by Agnès Varda, just recently became the first woman and only fourth director to be awarded an honorary Palme d’Or in Cannes. This film follows gleaners, those people who pick at recently reaped fields for the odd potato, leftover turnip. It has previously won awards around the world. In a 2014 Sight and Sound poll, film critics voted The Gleaners and I the eighth best documentary film of all time.

The film is part of a series at Proteus carrying our explorations of Commerce in new directions. Filmmaker and Proteus collaborator Charlotte Lagarde selected the Commerce films.

Please join us for wine and conversation at the opening reception for Trade Routes, the third exhibition of our COMMERCE year. Trade Routes focuses on the infrastructures and pathways of commerce, from the winds and tides that were the first determinants of inter-cultural trade to the technological breakthroughs that fuel global trade today. Sociologist-artist team David Schleifer and Tracy Gilman explore Navajo trading rug styles using weather-resistant electric cables. The works of Shari Mendelson and Venetia Dale address the impact of product innovation, specifically the invention of plastic, on the movement of objects and commodities from their countries of origin to their point of consumption.

Female Dog Vessel by Shari Mendelson

The slow but massive efficacy of international shipping is presented in Charlotte Lagarde’s video and collage. Paul Lloyd Sargent and Tony Stanzione show us the river-borne perspective of industrial flotsam. And in her two-month residency at Proteus throughout the Trade Routes exhibition, mobile vending activist Lauren Cannon will present her Institute for Mobile Vending, including weekly onsite collaborative design workshops and presentations by activists and designers on the vending industry.

The exhibition will also include depression-era WPA images of American workers on plates by Claire Leighton, an atlas of the trans-atlantic slave trade andCameron Becarrio‘s streaming video of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers and updated every three hours. These various works, along with accompanying public programming including lectures and film screenings, will highlight not only the movement and mapping of trade routes, but also the resulting changes in styles, uses and meanings of commodities and their materials as they criss-cross the globe.

Trade Routes was curated by Tammy Pittman and Susie Silbert.

Join us for an evening with the documentary filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde for a screening of her award-winning trilogy about women surfers. Charlotte’s love of the sea led her to document these women’s lives. The films are Zeuf (4 min), Swell, (23 min) and Heart of the Sea (55 min). A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screenings.

ZEUF
Zeuf (1994) is a four-minute portrait of Robin “Zeuf” Janizeufski, a 34 year old breast cancer survivor, a surfer and an ICU nurse. Zeuf challenges the ideas that one associates with breast cancer, representing a strong and beautiful image of life. Winner of the Cine Golden Eagle and the Director Award at the Black Maria Film Festival, Zeuf, Lagarde’s first student film at Stanford University, was on Sundance channel and shown in over 30 countries.

SWELL
Swell (1996) is a portrait of inter-generational community of women surfers in Santa Cruz, CA. Winner of a Gold Apple Award and the Isabella Liddell Art Award, Swell became a cult movie in the women surfing community.

HEART OF THE SEA
Winner of the PBS Independent Lens Audience Award, Heart of the Sea: Kapolioka’ehukai (2003) is a breathtaking portrait of surf legend Rell “Kapolioka’ehukai” Sunn, founding member of the Women’s Professional Surfing Association and beloved breast cancer activist. With exhilarating water scenes and captivating archival footage of surf culture, Heart of the Sea is an important look at Hawai’i’s integral part of America’s rich cultural heritage, a stirring portrait of a courageous legend.

For more information about the films, check Swell Cinema (www.swellcinema.com).

The Filmmaker
Born in France, Charlotte Lagarde has completed over a dozen documentary films since 1991, intimate portraits of people and places. Her love of the ocean led her to document magnificent women surfers in her award-winning short films Zeuf and Swell. Heart of the Sea, her feature-length documentary about the Hawaiian surfing legend, Rell Sunn, was broadcast in over 30 countries and won numerous awards including Best Documentary Award at the Ashland Independent Film Festival and the 2003 PBS Independent Lens Audience Award.

Her producing credits include Deann Borshay Liem’s In The Matter Of Cha Jung Hee (PBS/POV 2010) andGeographies of Kinship (in progress) and Carrie Lozano’s Academy award-winning Reporter Zero, which premiered at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival. Lagarde’s work has aired on PBS series POV and Independent lens, the Sundance Channel, HBO and Canal +, and received funding from ITVS, the NEA, the NEH and the Sundance Institute among others. 

After 25 years in California, Lagarde now lives in Brooklyn, where she is currently working on a follow-up film on her longtime friend Zeuf. This cinematic dialogue between a filmmaker and her early subject reveals a remarkable friendship at its most vulnerable and lucid as Zeuf approaches the premature end of her life. It is an intimate, inspiring portrait of a fiercely intelligent, vibrant, and beloved woman in close dialogue with the ocean, her body, her cancer, even her own death—which she describes as “a very gentle pull.”