Audrey of the Alps

Channel 4 Equinox documentary about the mystery of crop circles, broadcast shortly before Dave Chorley and Doug Bower revealed themselves to have started the craze.

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.

In a small village in north of Sweden lives a calf that dislikes enclosures. The desperate farmer builds fence after fence, but the calf still manages to get out. When a film team arrives to make a film about the events, everything changes.

Is your hedge thin and straggly? Don't worry, help is at hand.

In this short documentary from the Canada Vignettes series, a Saskatchewan grain elevator is moved across the snow-covered prairie to a new home after nearly a half-century of use. The film follows the lifting and transporting of the 9-storey, 200-ton structure, and examines the feelings of the people as they witness the final passing of their town's one and only grain elevator.

The traditional healers in the Swiss and French mountains.

When the Cows Come Home introduces audiences to Tilly and Maggie, a pair of cows that musician, journalist, artist and cow whisperer, Andrew Johnstone has befriended and subsequently saved from slaughter. The garrulous herdsman is enthusiastic to expound his views on animal husbandry, bovine communication and the vagaries of life in general, before the film walks us back through the events that have shaped the singular farmer-philosopher. From personal family tragedy to warring with Catholic school authorities, innovating in Hamilton’s nascent music scene to creating guerrilla art installations; Johnstone’s life has had a truly idiosyncratic trajectory. Mental health issues may have seen him retreat to life on the farm, but the film makes clear its subject’s restless inquisitiveness is far from being put out to pasture.

Les fils de la terre

For decades, migrant workers have worked the fields of Immokalee, harvesting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, oranges and other produce that is then shipped across the United States of America. Many of the workers are undocumented, and attempting to keep their jobs even as federal migration crackdowns hover over the town. The Fields of Immokalee film follows the daily lives of tomato workers, from the 5:00am trips to the parking lot in hopes of finding day labor, to work sessions in the scorching mid-day heat, to child detention centers for migrant youth that have been separated from their families. Via these vignettes, the film offers insight into the most volatile political issue of our time.

Proximity Designs is a sustainable development group that works to improve the lives of the rural poor in Myanmar. Proximity Designs boosts agricultural productivity by designing, producing, and distributing affordable products for people living on less than $2 a day.

This feature-length educational film teaches you how to set up your own permaculture orchard at virtually any scale. We recognize the limitations of the organic model as a substitute to conventional fruit growing, and want to propose a more holistic, regenerative approach based on permaculture principles. Based on 20 years of applied theory and trial and error, biologist and educator Stefan Sobkowiak shares his experience transforming a conventional apple orchard into an abundance of biodiversity that virtually takes care of itself. The concepts, techniques and tips presented in this film will help you with your own project, whether it is just a few fruit trees in your urban backyard, or a full-scale multi-acre commercial orchard.

On May 20, 2017, Jérôme Laronze, a 37-year-old cattle farmer, was shot dead by gendarmes at the end of a nine-day run. In conflict with government services, the organic farmer, spokesman for the Confédération paysanne de Saône-et-Loire, had evaded yet another health inspection and, during his escape, had tried to alert people to the malaise in his profession. The news of his death came as a bombshell in a farming world already plunged into mourning by a wave of suicides. How did it come to this? While their incomes depend almost exclusively on European subsidies - which favor large farms - farmers must, in return, comply with very strict standards.

This film recreates the true story of Tom Sukanen, an eccentric Finnish immigrant who homesteaded in Saskatchewan in the 1920s and 1930s. Sukanen spent ten years building and moving overland a huge iron ship that was to carry him back to his native Finland. The ship never reached water.

A look at man's relationship with Dirt. Dirt has given us food, shelter, fuel, medicine, ceramics, flowers, cosmetics and color --everything needed for our survival. For most of the last ten thousand years we humans understood our intimate bond with dirt and the rest of nature. We took care of the soils that took care of us. But, over time, we lost that connection. We turned dirt into something "dirty." In doing so, we transform the skin of the earth into a hellish and dangerous landscape for all life on earth. A millennial shift in consciousness about the environment offers a beacon of hope - and practical solutions.

The first of a documentary serie about rural France.

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.

July 1956: like every summer, the actor and cellist Maurice Baquet temporarily deserts the stage and the cinema studios to go to Chamonix where the mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat is waiting for him. A few days later, the two men achieved a historic first, that of the south face of the Aiguille du Midi (3,842 m), a magnificent wall rising like a rampart above the Vallée Blanche. July 1988: to pay tribute to the memory of his friend Gaston, now deceased, Maurice Baquet once again climbed this wall suspended between heaven and earth with the man who, 50 years his junior, is considered one of his best contemporary mountaineers: Christophe Profit.

During the rice sowing season, Jun, a young Catalan of Chinese origin, works as a seasonal worker in the Ebro Delta. This ancient labour will make him confront his own roots and the distance that separates him from his family.

Juan “Accidentes” Dominguez is on his biggest case ever. On behalf of twelve Nicaraguan banana workers he is tackling Dole Food in a ground-breaking legal battle for their use of a banned pesticide that was known by the company to cause sterility. Can he beat the giant, or will the corporation get away with it?

For more than 50 years, Hermann Völxen and his sister Hildegard have owned a farm with many cows. The documentary shows the sometimes troublesome day-to-day life of the farmer.