I read about L’opéra-Mouffe long before I had a chance to see it. I thought about it often before I’d seen it, and I think about it even more often since I finally saw it a few months ago. L’opéra-Mouffe is a largely silent 17-minute film that Varda made in 1958 while pregnant with her first child, Rosalie. The preface of the film tells us that it is “A pregnant woman’s filmed diary of Rue Mouffetard in 1958.” The film is like a poem of a dream, composed in movements, and alternating between scenes of blissful young lovers naked in bed, surreal and frightening images that serve as worrying metaphors for pregnancy, and documentary footage of people on the Rue Mouffetard. In 17 minutes the film covers the cycle of life — childhood, youth, old age, infirmity, death — but in not in any logical order, rather in the bewildering way that life moves or that we move through life.

Varda has said that in making the film she tried to give “… free range to a confusion of images. Not exactly fears, more like fantasies. Something that might reflect the imaginative world of pregnancy.” It’s difficult to describe how strange it is to be pregnant, and surely it’s different for everyone who goes through it. But for me it was such an odd combination of joy and worry, a sense of creating something impossibly valuable, but a sneaking fear that you’re losing some sense of yourself, some idea of who you are. You worry that you won’t have the time or energy to make all the things you need to make. Before I’d seen the film I was comforted by the idea that Varda made films while she was pregnant. She made Daguerréotypes 16 years later whilst pregant with her second child. She didn’t let pregnancy or motherhood hamper her creativity, instead she harnessed the heightened emotions, the confusion, and the strange new way of looking at herself and the world as a sort of creative superpower. Throughout their lives her children became collaborators on her films, appearing in them, shooting them, helping behind the scenes.

Much has been written about L’opéra-Mouffe as a feminist creation, or even as falling disappointingly short of being a truly feminist work. But for me, that is beside the point. This is a truly human film, one of those works of art that is so completely personal it becomes universal. It’s a finely-crafted film but there’s a real honesty to it, a lack of self-consciousness. The naked lovers, filmed with such intimacy that they become nearly indistinguishable from one another in certain shots radiate such happy humanness. The film opens upon the naked body of a pregnant woman, we see her breathing, we see the baby moving: It’s very quiet, very still other than the rise and fall of her belly. The image of a naked pregnant woman would have been very shocking in the U.S. at the time, and to this day the body of a woman, and in particular a pregnant woman, is something that is seen as not hers to control. But this is different. This isn’t startling and this isn’t a body presented as a beautiful work of art. This is living. This is what it means to be alive, all of it.

It is the footage of the Rue Mouffe that I found particularly moving, and that I think about all the time. It’s changed the way I see the world around me. Varda describes how she would go each day with a folding chair and a borrowed 16 mm camera and film the waves of people who walked by her. She became a fixture there, but the footage is not entirely documentary, as no footage ever is. We feel the bright odd eye of the filmmaker directing the shots. She captures the residents of the Rue Mouffetard with a Tati-esque recognition of our shared human foibles. So many people limping, or wiping their noses, or fixing their hair in a sort of choreographed shared movement. There was a lot of poverty and homelessness in this part of Paris in 1958, and Varda said that she was trying to capture the contradiction of expecting a child and being full of hope, and moving about in this world of poor drunken people without hope who seemed unhappy. There’s always that sense, when you’re expecting a child, that feeling of “what kind of world am I bringing this life into?”

Varda is not looking with dismay or judgment or even pity, though. And she is not unaware of the complicated nature of documenting the people in the world around her — an issue familiar to all street photographers and documentarians. She said, “It’s the type of thinking that pushes looking to the limits of cruelty and tenderness. I felt that, starting with the minutest sensations, I understood lyricism.” She said later about the film, “I felt a tenderness for them, especially the elderly. I imagined them as babies when their mothers kissed them on their tummies.” And there it is. This is the thing I think about all the time. This is Alyosha’s elder, Zossima, in Brothers Karamazov telling him “to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would for the sick in hospitals.” You don’t need to be pregnant or a woman or a mother to feel this empathy for all people, to recognize that we all move through the same world, playing and eating and loving and aging. We all have our worries and our troubles and hopes and joys. That inescapable tenderness is painful sometimes, but it is powerful too. It is what it means to be alive. All of it.