Praise of the Distance(2008)

Fuente Álamo, la caricia del tiempo(es)

The camera falls in love with the characters, the landscape and the objects and is installed with the tenderness that inoculates the life of the town itself. The camera is the thousand eyes of the gaze of a rigorous anthropologist, although in love, multiplying so as not to lose detail in 24 hours of people, activity, games, intimacy ... Recording every sound that pierces the oceanic silence of the countryside open.And night comes. And the gazpacho. And the party. You see.

Modern Life(fr)

For ten years, Raymond Depardon has followed the lives of farmer living in the mountain ranges. He allows us to enter their farms with astounding naturalness. This moving film speaks, with great serenity, of our roots and of the future of the people who work on the land. This the last part of Depardon's triptych "Profils paysans" about what it is like to be a farmer today in an isolated highland area in France. "La vie moderne" examines what has become of the persons he has followed for ten years, while featuring younger people who try to farm or raise cattle or poultry, come hell or high water.

Cabbage, Potatoes and other Demons(ro)

1 village, 1.000 tractors, 100.000 tons of cabbages & potatoes each year - which are hardly sold and eventually destroyed. Is there any way out?

Nous paysans(fr)

In barely a century, French peasants have seen their world profoundly turned upside down. While they once made up the vast majority of the country, today they are only a tiny minority and are faced with an immense challenge: to continue to feed France. From the figure of the simple tenant farmer described by Emile Guillaumin at the beginning of the 20th century to the heavy toll paid by peasants during the Great War, from the beginnings of mechanization in the inter-war period to the ambivalent figure of the peasant under the Occupation, From the unbridled race to industrialization in post-war France to the realization that it is now necessary to rethink the agricultural model and invent the agriculture of tomorrow, the film looks back at the long march of French peasants.

Rioja: The Land of a Thousand Wines(es)

By telling the human stories behind the entire value chain that gives life to the Spanish wine with the greatest international projection, ‘Rioja, Land of the Thousand Wines’ portrays a currently blooming wine region underpinned by the talent and the work of the new generations of winemakers that operate side by side with the region’s historic wineries. The film puts the focus on the match between territory and product, wisdom and tradition, and lays a bridge between the origins and the future of Rioja. An immersion into a fascinating world that, through captivating cinematography and careful editing, attempts to find the keys to understanding what Rioja wine is and what makes it so special.

Prime Farmland(en)

This documentary film follows farmers and activists fighting together to stop the Indiana Enterprise Center, a mega-sized industrial park planned west of South Bend, Indiana

Arcadia(en)

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

The Gleaners and I(fr)

Varda focuses her eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism.

Miyama, Kyōto Prefecture(de)

The follow-up film to “Barstow, California” takes us to the mountains of Miyama, a remote forest and tourist area north of Kyoto. Uwe Walter, a shakuhachi player from Germany, lives there with his wife Mitsuyo for 30 years. Together with the villagers he prepares the annual Gion Festival. On the eve of the festival, the village representatives tell him that his self-built studio is to be demolished. This brings back memories for him of earlier times and his first steps as a Nō actor. In the manner of a fresco, the film interweaves rural depictions of everyday life with the story of its German protagonist. In the village community with its togetherness of generations, Uwe shares life with his neighbours, with farmers, hunters, woodsmen, poultry farmers and anglers, tills his kitchen garden, and like other tradition-conscious villagers, he also grows his rice. The film shows them in a harsh mountain landscape between the rainy season and the first snow.

Cyrille(fr)

Cyrille, a young gay farmer from Auvergne, has only one friend, a homosexual like him. One day, he goes on vacation to a beach in Charente Maritime. He cannot swim and sees the sea for the first time. It was there that he met the director Rodolphe Marconi who decided to devote this sensitive and gentle portrait to him, plunging us into an agricultural world in crisis and into a life often lonely and made up of hard work rarely pays off.

Profils paysans : le quotidien(fr)

Second documentary of a trilogy produced on the long term (together with Profils paysans: l'approche (2001) and Profils paysans: La vie moderne (2008)), showing the simple lives of farmers in contemporary Southern France.

A Life on the Farm(en)

A strange story from Somerset, England about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.

The Birds Changed Names And The World Turned Into Ice(es)

Migrant families experience violence, but they also keep beautiful memories when they arrive in new lands. Fantastic and intimate stories, recalled from childhood, travel across time and space, magically intermingling with the help of the four elements and breaking the boundaries of cinema.

All this Roughness(es)

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

The Hidden Battle(es)

During the Second World War, the Allies threaten to attack Spain, an allegedly neutral country, if the Francoist regime keeps allowing Nazi Germany to extract Galician tungsten, a strategic mineral, paramount to the war effort.

North by Current(en)

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

A la porra(es)

Rice People(ko)

Even in the push and pull era which is full of flour and sugar, rice firmly protects the table of the rice bowl nation! There are farmers who grow the rice in different ways. Nam Ho-hyeon, a young farmer who continues his father's family business, challenges farming with agricultural drones that spray coated rice seeds in large quantities, but new technologies that seemed to bring a rosy future leave only endless homework in a series of trials and errors. Lee Geun, an urban farmer who started farming on weekends and fell in love with farming, lives a life of small farmers who touch and cultivate them with their hands rather than machines, and studies and protects the world of traditional native rice that has disappeared in history. Our rice, which grows with sincerity, is filled with happiness, and conveys the power of life presented by nature for a long time! The moving journey begins now!

The Way Without Limits(es)

The Way of Saint James, northern Spain, 2016. Two brothers, Oliver, the eldest, and Juan Luis, the youngest, a disabled person in a wheelchair, face the hardest challenge they have found so far on their long road of dirt, stones, rain and cold. Everyone says they will not make it, but, fortunately, they are not alone.

John Ford: The Man Who Invented America(fr)

Over a 50-year career and more than a hundred movies, filmmaker John Ford (1894-1973) forged the legend of the Far West. By giving a face to the underprivileged, from humble cowboys to persecuted minorities, he revealed like no one else the great social divisions that existed and still exist in the United States. More than four decades after his death, what remains of his legacy and humanistic values in the memory of those who love his work?