Veteran French filmmaker Agnes Varda ads a triumphant and ultra-contemporary chapter to her life's work of cinematic investigations into the lives of characters relegated to society's margins (usually women) with the graceful and compelling documentary, THE GLEANERS AND I. Departing from Jean-Francois Millet's celebrated 1867 portrait of women picking through a harvested wheat field entitled "Les Glaneuses," Varda constructs a modest and compassionate visual essay on the concept and lifestyle of "gleaning" or scavenging, once ubiquitous in rural 19th Century France. With digital camera in hand, Varda vagabonds around France in search of the 21st Century's incarnation of the gleaners. From potato fields in central France, to abandoned vineyards in Burgundy, to supermarket dumpsters in Paris, Varda's film portrays a completely surprising and ultimately complex populace, who subsist off of the waste of others. The film's casual style allows the intelligence, dignity, and honesty of the subjects to shine through as Varda herself pieces together a modern aesthetic and ideology of gleaning. With affectionate humor and searching intelligence, Varda points the camera at herself, marveling at her own process of aging and the gleaning that lies at the center of her own art and life.

DVD Features:

Region 1
Keep Case
Single Side - Single Layer
Full Frame - 1.33
Additional Release Material:
Documentary: THE GLEANERS AND I: TWO YEARS LATER
Interactive Features:
Optional English Subtitles
Text/Photo Galleries:
Production Notes
Filmographies: Agnes Varda

Agnes Varda: Director/screenwriter, CLEO A 5 DE 7

Agnes Varda: Director/screenwriter, CLEO A 5 DE 7

Joanna Bruzdowicz: 

Laurent Pineau: Editor, THE GLEANERS AND I (2000)
Agnes Varda: Director/screenwriter, CLEO A 5 DE 7

"...Varda takes GLEANERS beyond the existential demands of scavenging to make the case for it as fun. She's rational, childlike, historical, certainly art-historical, legalistic, humanistic, and of course, persistent..."
"...[A] liberating, personal documentary assemblage....GLEANERS feels delightfully organic, eccentrically rambling, the found artistic collage of a woman who herself loves to collect..."
"...Captivating....THE GLEANERS AND I is charged with the pleasure of discovery....It is typically brisk, dryly witty and inventive, unsentimental yet caring..."
"...Illuminating and even charming..."