The Gleaners and I

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Sub-Genres - Essay Film, Social History, Anthropology, Biography  |   Release Date - Oct 1, 2000 (USA), Oct 1, 2000 (USA - Unknown), Mar 7, 2001 (USA - Limited)  |   Run Time - 85 min.  |   Countries - France  |   MPAA Rating - NR
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Synopsis by Jonathan Crow

Legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda takes digital camcorder in hand and roams about the French countryside in search of "gleaners." An age-old practice, as depicted in Millet's famous painting, performed traditionally by peasant women, gleaners scavenged the remains of a crop after the harvest. Varda finds their modern-day equivalent collecting rejected potatoes outside of Lyon, fallen apples in Provence, and refuse in the markets of Paris. Along the way, she talks to a man sporting yellow rubber boots who has lived on trash for ten years, a gourmet chef who gleans for his restaurant, a homeless doctorate in biology who teaches literacy courses to immigrants for free, a couple of artists who use trash in their work, and the grandson of early cinema innovator Étienne-Jules Marey. Along the way, Varda discusses heart-shaped potatoes, big trucks on the highway, the waste of consumerism, and the ravages of time. This film was screened at the 2000 Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.

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Keywords

character [values], consumerism, farmland, greed, harvest, waste