Day by day, Agnès Varda recounts the events that take place between 1 and 9 June 1968 at Villa Fake in the Hollywood hills. This is where Viva lives with her two lovers Jim and Jerry. They spend their time chatting and fooling about on sofas, next to the swimming pool or in a big bed in front of a large panoramic window. A visitor arrives from New York. » The avant-garde film-maker Shirley Clarke wants to make a film with the three of them. The undertaking fails, however, due to fights with the film industry and the film-maker’s depression. Events occurring in the outside world, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and the attack on Andy Warhol, enter the villa via television and phone. In a variety of ways, Varda intermingles pop with politics, fiction with real events.«
– Retrospective Agnès Varda, arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, September 2009

Lions Love (… and Lies) is not just a film about the myth of Hollywood, the hippie culture or the hype surrounding the New York underground scene, it is a feature film that uses every opportunity to break through the limitations of its genre. Agnès Varda appears several times herself in the film, sometimes very much the director, giving orders to her reluctant protagonist, sometimes she holds a cardboard camera. At the end, Viva stares silently into the camera for several minutes. And in the cinema at us, the viewers.