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Now Playing! Mia Hansen-Løve’s Everyday People at BAMPFA

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Still from 'Goodbye First Love,' 2011. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)

French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies have a fluidity and a meandering momentum that’s inspired by life, not by other movies. That’s unusual, since most directors in their 30s grew up with a remote in each hand. In fact, it wasn’t until writer–director Olivier Assayas cast the teenage Hansen-Løve in a couple of his movies that she got turned on to cinema.

They eventually became a couple, if you must know, and had a child together. Equally important, Hansen-Løve enrolled in (and dropped out of) drama school, then became a film critic before making her first short film in 2004. She’s gone on to direct eight features; the latest, Maya, will reach the Bay Area in the coming months while Bergman Island, starring Mia Wasikowska, is tipped to premiere at Cannes.

Still from 'Things to Come,' 2016.
Still from ‘Things to Come,’ 2016. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)

Hansen-Løve is one of those self-effacing filmmakers who readily touts her influences, notably her French ancestors Jean Renoir and Éric Rohmer. Among the packed-house highlights of her visit to the Bay Area this week and next for the BAMPFA retrospective “Life Goes On: The Films of Mia Hansen-Løve,” she’ll introduce Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere (Jan. 26) and Gérard Blain’s 1974 rarity The Pelican (Feb. 1).

Of course, Hansen-Løve will also be on hand to present her own work: Things to Come (Jan. 26) starring the incomparable Isabel Huppert, the semiautobiographical Goodbye First Love (Jan. 27), the quietly unsettling film-world drama Father of My Children (Jan. 31) and her breakthrough debut All is Forgiven (Feb. 2). “Life Goes On” goes on after Hansen-Løve’s departure, which is exactly how it should be. Call it meandering momentum.

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