The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache

"You have to record things; whether they’re pretty or not, they’re important.”— Jean Eustache

Celebrate the life and career of one of cinema’s great enfants terribles of autofiction with these new 4k restorations of French filmmaker Jean Eustache's work by Janus Films.

Series Pass: $90 | $60 Members
Pass provides access to all in-person Jean Eustache screenings, July 14-23 at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

Few filmmakers are as singular at capturing the sorrow and humor of being alive in a time and place than Jean Eustache. Eustache was a satellite figure of the ascendant Nouvelle Vague while it was revolutionizing the aesthetics and aesthetic politics of narrative cinema. But he emerged in the second half of the 1960s as a formidable filmmaker in his own right, directing several medium-length fiction films and documentaries before producing one of French cinema’s all-time masterpieces, the titanic and epochal The Mother and the Whore (1973). 

Eustache’s career continued with more sporadic, always fascinatingly idiosyncratic efforts in the years to come (including the achingly, heartbreakingly beautiful My Little Loves [1974]), before his suicide in 1981. A true pioneer of autobiographical cinema, Eustache’s influence has been sharply felt in the years since—particularly in the work of Léos Carax, Jim Jarmusch, Philippe Garrel, and Noah Baumbach, to name a few—and yet his films have historically been difficult for American audiences to access. With these new 4K restorations of Eustache’s work by Janus Films, join us as we celebrate the life and career of one of cinema’s great enfants terribles of autofiction.

In partnership with Janus Films, with special thanks to Les Films du Losange.