
La Ceinture Dorée
★ 10 · 1947 · 16m · Documentary
La Ceinture Dorée is an institutional documentary film on the Brittany region in France. The different scenes describe the daily life of the Bretons, starting with a geography lesson on Brittany in a classroom. Then a Breton landscape where a painter paints a house, women in headdresses in a procession, bell towers and forgiveness, prayers at Calvaries. Then follow the plans of the boats at the dock and the work of the oyster farmers. Lobster ponds, algae collectors and fertilizer collection. Daily life of the Leonards, preparation of pancakes in front of the fireplace and pancake meal. etc
More Like This

Island Observed
1966
A film record of M.E.T.E.I. (Medical Expedition to Easter Island), one of the most unusual scientific enquiries ever launched, headed by a McGill University research team. While the film is concerned mainly with the physical condition of Easter Islanders, it also provides glimpses of island activities, a village wedding, and the famous long-faced stone sculptures.
More info →
Song of Armorica
2016 · ★ 6
A poetic drama, spoken in the Breton language and set in a Breton fishing community, telling of the impossible love between a waifish fisherman and a highborn lady-of-the-manor.
More info →
Nous paysans
2021 · ★ 7.8
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.
More info →
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Quart of Milk
1951 · ★ 10
Documentary short subject preserved by the Academy Film Archive, from the Marshall Plan Collection, in 2003.
More info →
Alexis Tremblay: Habitant
1943 · ★ 9
This short documentary illustrates rural French Canadian life in the early 1940s. The film follows Alexis Tremblay and his family through the busy autumn days as they bring in the harvest and help with bread baking and soap making. Winter sees the children revelling in outdoor sports while the women are busy with their weaving, and, with the coming of spring young and old alike repair to the fields once more to plough the earth in preparation for another season of varied crops. One of the first NFB films to be produced, directed, written and shot by women.
More info →
Windbreaks on the Prairies
1943 · ★ 10
This short film serves as a cautionary tale to farmers who recklessly cut down trees on their land. When prairie farmers engaged in this practice to facilitate plowing, they discovered that the trees had served as windbreaks protecting top soil from erosion. The Dominion Department of Agriculture's experimental station at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, cultivated acres of young trees for distribution to farmers.
More info →
A Home on the Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma
2002 · ★ 8
"A Home On The Range" tells the little-known story of Jews who fled the pogroms and hardships of Eastern Europe and traveled to California to become chicken ranchers. Even in the sweatshops of New York they heard about Petaluma where the Jews were not the shopkeepers and the professionals, they were the farmers. Meet this fractious, idealistic, intrepid group of Eastern European Jews and their descendants as they confront obstacles of language and culture on their journey towards becoming Americans. Jack London, California vigilantes, McCarthyism, the Cold War and agribusiness all come to life in this quintessentially American story of how a group of immigrants found their new home, a home on the range.
More info →

King Corn
2007 · ★ 6.3
King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom – corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naiveté, two college buddies return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America. With the help of some real farmers, oodles of fertilizer and government aide, and some genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way, they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America’s modern food system in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary.
More info →
Mendès la France
2022 · ★ 8
Forty years after the death of Pierre Mendès France, Yves Jeuland and Alix Maurin reveal another side to this figure: the story of his life, told through the pages of his private notebooks. PMF led a romantic and extraordinary life as a French politician and Jew, both loved and hated.
More info →
Food, Inc.
2008 · ★ 7.4
Documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner examines how mammoth corporations have taken over all aspects of the food chain in the United States, from the farms where our food is grown to the chain restaurants and supermarkets where it's sold. Narrated by author and activist Eric Schlosser, the film features interviews with average Americans about their dietary habits, commentary from food experts like Michael Pollan and unsettling footage shot inside large-scale animal processing plants.
More info →