Lola (re-release)

In Nantes, the young cabaret dancer Lola has been waiting for seven years for the return of her great love Michel, the father of her son. While she continues to believe that he will come back, several people cross her path: a childhood friend who falls in love with her, an American sailor searching for a lost love, and a young girl dreaming of a different life. Slowly, a mosaic of desires, chance encounters, and missed opportunities unfolds, in which everyone is searching for love, but no one seems quite able to hold on to it.

With Lola, Jacques Demy made his feature film debut and immediately laid the foundations for his distinctive cinematic universe, in which characters and themes would repeatedly reappear throughout his work. The film was shot in Demy’s hometown of Nantes and is regarded as a key work of the French New Wave. The atmospheric black-and-white cinematography by Raoul Coutard (known for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless) and Demy’s first collaboration with composer Michel Legrand marked the beginning of one of the most important creative partnerships in French cinema. Lola was nominated for two BAFTA Awards, including Best Film.