A beach strewn with mirrors is the opening landscape of Agnès Varda’s new film Les Plages d’Agnès (pictured right). It seems a place at once alien and oddly recognisable, even touchingly familiar. Oh yes! we realise as we watch the different people, walking about on this beach, appear and disappear in mosaic-like fragments in the randomly placed squares of glass – they represent friends, relatives or colleagues from Varda’s past, and Varda herself is there too – this is an animated scrapbook. These are album-style snaps come to life and grown life-size. They might have spilled from some giant time capsule that has landed on Planet Now from Planet Then.

Varda isn’t alone in this new age of exploration in space and time: personal space, personal time. Films about filmmakers are touching down in cinemas worldwide. With titles such as My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), Of Time and the City (Terence Davies) and – a joker in every pack – Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, the memoir-movie has come to land and to stay. Expanding the category to “me-movies” more generally, we could include Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Bill Maher (the forthcoming Religulous) – feature documentarists and commentator-satirists becoming foreground figures in their own films.