A Well Spent Life

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.

Tensions rise when the trailblazing Mother of the Blues and her band gather at a Chicago recording studio in 1927. Adapted from August Wilson's play.

In 1962, a group of legendary American blues musicians embarked on a series of tours to the United Kingdom. Footage from these classic concerts, which feature the likes of Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Junior Wells and more, are collected here. Blues fans will relish appearances by Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Big Joe Turner, Otis Rush ...

Taken from the European tours organised for American blues musicians between 1962 and 1969, this release features performances by several popular blues artists, including: Big Mama Thornton, Roosevelt Sykes, Buddy Guy, Dr. Isaiah Ross, Big Joe Turner, Skip James, Bukka White, Son House, Hound Dog Taylor and Little Walter, Koko Taylor and Little Walter, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Helen Humes, Earl Hooker, and Muddy Waters.

Ranch Album depicts real cowboy life and rough country ranching in Northern Arizona season by season, revealing a sense of spirit and culture that have survived in the American west for a very long time.

Live, intimate, and raw, Sessions For Robert J is the essential audio/video companion to Eric Clapton's 2004 gold, Top 10 Me And Mr. Johnson, tribute to blues legend Robert Johnson. Filmed during tour rehearsals in London and Dallas plus a Los Angeles hotel room and the Dallas warehouse where Johnson made some of his final recordings, Sessions for Robert J finds Clapton performing all Robert Johnson songs with his touring band, acoustically with Doyle Bramhall II and solo-as well as discussing Johnson and his influence. A performance/documentary DVD with 14 tracks (from which the 11 CD selections are taken), Sessions for Robert J is blues heaven.

Begun as the official chronicle of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bus tour through New Orleans and southwestern Louisiana, it turns into a more informal, out-of-the-way journey to blues and zydeco clubs, gospel churches and radio stations, and musical family gatherings in backwater bayous.

May It Fill Your Soul is a film about Bulgarian traditional music, about the pain of emigration and the promise of immigration, and about a family with a century-long musical history. Bulgaria's astonishingly rich village music traditions include strong women's singing, musical instruments with roots its millennia-old pastoral lifestyle and its 500-year history in the Ottoman Empire, and its lively dancing in additive meters of 5, 7, 9, and 11 beats to the measure. These practices are presented through the lens of a musical family trained during Bulgaria's communist regime (1944-1989) to represent the best that Bulgaria had to offer the world, but who made the wrenching decision in the post-communist period to immigrate to the United States for the sake of their daughters' futures. From that vantage point they have been able to teach their art to, and "fill the souls" of, singers, dancers, musicians, and audiences all over the world.

Farmers in the Île-de-France region, they filmed life on the farm, working in the fields, and family and village celebrations on 8 mm or Super 8 film. From the 1950s to the 1980s, these testimonies unfold a history of rural life: we move away from a peasant and family model to industrial agriculture for export. Through these family images, I attempt to answer my own questions about our agricultural future. In the 1950s, the land of Île-de-France fed us.

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.

Province of Lugo, Galicia, Spain. A year in the life of A Fonsagrada, a rural region whose inhabitants live both near and far from urban civilization; a praise of the distance that crosses the four seasons of the year, whose inevitable passage transforms both the natural environment and the existence of people, a simple, dignified and peaceful existence.

A 1956 Belgian film, Low Light and Blue Smoke, showcases the music of American blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy, capturing his performance at the Chapel of Les Brigittines in Brussels during his 1956 European tour.

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.

Shake ‘Em On Down is a one-hour documentary film which aims to tell the story of Fred McDowell, who was first recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959, traveled to Europe with the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, mentored Bonnie Raitt, and served as the cornerstone of the unique and enduring North Mississippi- style of blues music.

This film traces the road of the Blues and takes us on a journey to mythical places: From the banks of the Niger to New Orleans, going up the Mississippi through Memphis to the skyscrapers of Chicago. It tells the story of this culture which faced the worst barriers and shows that Humanity can overcome barbarity.

Toyoda Toshiaki went to Sado Island and filmed musician Koshiro Hino and Kodo, the local Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble, while they performed music composed especially for Shiver.

An unflinching and deeply personal journey into the life and work of guitarist Eric Clapton told through his own words and songs.

Geri Ashur’s Me & Stella traces the life of blues musician, folk singer, and composer Elizabeth Cotten—and her guitar, Stella—who is best known for writing the folk standard “Freight Train.” After spending her early teenage years writing songs and playing the guitar, Cotten put her musical career on hold for three decades. Encouraged by the very musical Seeger family, for whom she worked as a maid, Cotten started recording and became a star in the 1960s burgeoning folk revival at an age when most people are contemplating retirement.

Titou will soon be forty. He lives high up in a sheep shed in the Corbières mountains. With Soledad, who lives in a nearby caravan, they make their own wine, compose their music, live their love in step with the seasons – much as you might cultivate resistance.

Live action documentary footage of a concert by the Kodo drummers of Japan at the Acropolis, Greece, in 1995, with commentary by members of the drum group concerning the concert and the drum troupe