Social Animals

Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.

A farming community gathers on a plateau on the border of three regions for the funeral of traditional agriculture. It’s a film to ward off the disappearance of a millenary culture.

French visual artist-director JR (co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary FACES PLACES with the legendary Agnès Varda) situates his latest social-art intervention in a Southern Californian supermax prison, where he has imagined an enormously ambitious collaboration with the facility’s inmates.

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato ponders: what would happen if one of the prisoners managed to free themselves from their chains and escape from the cave? What if that prisoner were Jay, a little 7-year-old boy?