Vagabond (1985) filming locations

La Grande-Motte, France

The scene : 5 min — Flashback on a beach in La Grande-Motte: two motorcyclists, Paulo and Dominique, spot Mona emerging naked from the sea, hesitating to approach her, before she resumes the coastal road in the first tracking shot.

Vauvert, France

The scene : 6 min — In a café near Montcalm, the truck driver who picked up Mona tells a mason about the passenger; he remembers finding her asleep in a building he was demolishing.

Jonquières-Saint-Vincent, France

The scene : 8 min — In the village, Mona buys bread as the second tracking shot unfolds, draws water from a pump, and sets up her tent; Katy, who helped her, confides to her mother that she wishes to be as free as she is. Further along, Mona quenches her thirst at a hose in the fields.

Saint-Étienne-du-Grès, France

The scene : 11 min — Mona slept under her tent next to the cemetery; in the morning, the gravedigger wakes her up, then she crosses a field in the third tracking shot, nibbling on a stale piece of bread.

Générac, France

The building houses the Café des Sports, which corners with the Grand'Rue de Générac.

The scene : 12 min — Mona pushes the door of this village bistro; a young man offers her a sandwich and she slips "À contre-courant" by Valérie Lagrange into the juke-box, under the watchful eyes of card players that the script aligns with Cézanne's canvases.

Uchaud, France

The scene : 14 min — Between fields and plastic tunnels, Mona hides as a police car passes during the fourth tracking shot. A local mechanic later tells at the café that he had her wash a car, and the next morning his son sees her coming out of the young woman's tent.

Saint-Hilaire-d'Ozilhan, France

The scene : 18 min — On the side of the road to Uzès, Mona thumbs her way unsuccessfully and then continues on foot, while Paulo and his biker friends talk about a robbery.

Domaine du Grand Fontanille

Saint-Etienne-du-Grès, France

The scene : 19 min — Yolande, who watches over the manor house with her uncle Aimé, discovers Mona and David asleep in a room and envies the camera "the lovers" of the castle. The couple settles there for a few days, between joints and radio, until they are burglarized by Paulo's gang: David is knocked out, Mona flees, and the uncle responds to the gendarmes.

Tarascon, France

The scene : 30 min — The nuns give a bowl of soup to Mona, who then walks along the fence of a karting track in the fifth tracking shot.

Poulx, France

The scene : 32 min — On the garrigues of Poulx, a couple of goat herders, Sylvain, a former philosophy student returned to the land, and Sabine, welcome Mona and entrust her with a caravan and a plot of land to cultivate; she does nothing with it and leaves after an argument.

Bellegarde, France

The scene : 41 min — After a night in a run-down farm, Mona tries to sell her goat cheese to a prostitute waiting for a client in front of the cemetery.

Manduel, France

The scene : 43 min — At night, in the sixth tracking shot, Mona walks past the illuminated windows of a house where a couple is watching cartoon cats on television; Mrs. Pierrette tells her husband that she should have acted like that hippie.

Tarascon, France

The scene : 44 min — During Mrs. Landier's trip with Mona, the film offers a panoramic view of Tarascon and Beaucaire, facing each other across the Rhône.

Aigues-Vives, France

The scene : 44 min — On the road from Lunel to Aigues-Vives, Mrs. Landier (Macha Méril), a university lecturer studying the disease affecting plane trees, questions her passenger, who prefers to turn up the volume of "Marcia Baila" by the Rita Mitsouko.

Barbentane, France

The scene : 44 min — Mrs. Landier and Mona stop here for chichis and a beer. Later, Mona is hitchhiking on a bridge near a nightclub, and Yolande picks her up, with Paulo dead drunk on the bench.

Nîmes, France

The scene : 44 min — Mrs. Landier has a meeting in a roadside hotel at the west exit of Nîmes; Mona is sleeping in the car.

Marsillargues, France

The scene : 52 min — The next day, Mrs. Landier meets her assistant Jean-Pierre where they are felling a sick plane tree, and Mona exchanges a few words with him.

Marguerittes, France

The scene : 55 min — Leaving a blood donation, Mona crosses the city in a seventh tracking shot and then comes to warm herself on the construction site of a house, which the mason will remember her.

Saint-Gilles, France

The scene : 58 min — After a meal of sardines by a wooden fire, Mona works for a crate merchant, who pays her and talks to her about the dying plane trees.

Le Grau-du-Roi, France

The scene : 59 min — Mrs. Landier drops Mona off at the edge of the woods near the water tower; it is in this woods that the young woman is raped, during the eighth tracking shot.

Bellegarde, France

The scene : 1 hr 5 min — At the estate, Mona meets Assoun, a Tunisian worker who tends to the vines; he houses her and puts her to work, and she tells him her real name. The foreman and his wife then recount her departure, enforced by the Moroccan workers returning from leave.

Jonquières-Saint-Vincent, France

The building houses the bar-tobacco shop Le Marillion, in the village square.

The scene : 1 hr 13 min — Mona and a young backpacker exit the café on the square during the tenth tracking shot, just before she leaves him there.

Jonquières-Saint-Vincent, France

The scene : 1 hr 13 min — At the gas station, Mona leaves her traveling companion and climbs alone into a car that was being refueled.

2 rue Auguste (Nîmes)

Nîmes, France

The scene : 1 hr 15 min — At night, Yolande parks a DS 19 in front of the garage entrance and drops off Mona at Lydie's place, the elderly lady for whom she cleans, just a stone's throw from the Maison Carrée. The next day, Mona in her apron makes Lydie, who is laughing heartily, drink, and Yolande is dismissed by the nephew.

Nîmes, France

The railway station built between 1840 and 1844 and registered as a historical monument, the Nîmes station was to be renamed "Nîmes-Centre" at the opening of the Nîmes-Pont-du-Gard station in 2019, a name that only appears on some SNCF materials.

The scene : 1 hr 23 min — Mona fails in the station hall: she awakens on a bench, tries to sell the stolen cutlery from Lydie's place, and stumbles there, drunk, under the gaze of Jean-Pierre, who has come to put Yolande on the train.

Nîmes, France

The scene : 1 hr 28 min — Homeless people take Mona to their squat, somewhere in the city; David bursts in, a fight knocks over the brazier and the fire catches, Mona flees leaving behind her tent. Meanwhile, she rummages through a phone booth on a street, during the eleventh tracking shot.

Boulbon, France

The scene : 1 hr 37 min — While looking for bread, Mona finds herself in the middle of the Pailhasses festival: men dressed as trees chase her and smear her with wine dregs, and she manages to escape in a daze.

Saint-Aunès, France

The two twin cypress trees of Pioch Palat, planted in the early 1800s, overlook the vineyards of Saint-Aunès, between Vendargues and the village.

The scene : The film opens here: at the foot of the mound with two cypress trees, a farmworker discovers the frozen body of Mona in a ditch, and the police gather the first testimonies. Towards the end, a van drops her off near the same trees; she takes shelter under a radish greenhouse, then, in the final tracking shot, she walks back, stumbles, and dies in the ditch.

Marsillargues, France

The scene : This house is part of the locations for which Varda thanks the occupants at the beginning of the film, although no source mentions what was filmed there.

France

The scene : The people of Saint-André-la-Côte are among those thanked in the opening credits; the scene shot on location is not specified.

Tresques, France

The scene : The opening credits thank the residents of Tresques, one of the filming villages; no source indicates which scene was filmed there.

Redessan, France

The scene : Redessan is one of the filming locations noted outside the credits; the corresponding scene is not identified.

Beaucaire, France

The Abbey of Saint-Roman, in Beaucaire, is classified as a historical monument.

The scene : The abbey is among the filming locations noted by other sources than the credits, without specifying the scene filmed there.