2K Restoration
A lyrical and soulful documentary about a family's relationship to their farm, the nature that surrounds them, and the inevitable modernity that will forever erase their way of life.
Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique is a poetic journey through four seasons of rural life, blending raw observation with artful staging to reveal the Rouquier family’s intimate connection to the land. Celebrated for its groundbreaking realism, Farrebique made waves at the first Cannes Film Festival, sharing the inaugural FIPRESCI Prize with Brief Encounter. The film went on to receive accolades like a BAFTA nomination for Best Documentary (1949) and a Grand International Award nomination at the Venice Film Festival (1947). [90 min; documentary; French with English subtitles]
"One of the most remarkable French films of the 1940s, certainly one of the least expected. More than just a documentary, it is an invaluable ethnological study into a people and a way of life that have by now become extinct, their existence barely perceptible in what we observe in the countryside today." — James Travers, French Films
"Rouquier integrates numerous instances of such implicit commentary by juxtaposing nature and animals with the family, so that something as inconsequential as flies swarming around a horse’s open eye becomes a charged visual metaphor, as if nature itself can anticipate, or even express, the mounting evidence that modernization is both a necessity and a nuisance." — Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine
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