The Gleaners and I

Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (French: Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse) won the César for Best Documentary Film in 2001 and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film the same year. It is one of the most celebrated late-career works of any director in twentieth-century French cinema and the project that effectively reactivated Varda's international visibility after the lower-profile period of the 1990s.

The film was shot by Varda herself on the small consumer Sony DV camcorders that had become available at the end of the 1990s, the production reportedly used three different lightweight digital cameras across roughly eighteen months of dispersed filming. The handheld, intimate, deliberately home-video-influenced visual style was a deliberate decision by Varda to mark the film as a counterpoint to mainstream documentary production, and it is now regularly cited as one of the foundational European essay-films of the digital era.

Jean-François Millet's 1857 oil painting The Gleaners (which hangs at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and depicts three women gathering leftover wheat after a harvest) is the central reference point of the film, with Varda directly visiting the painting's location in the Barbizon forest. A two-year follow-up, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002), revisited the people who had appeared in the original. Varda would continue working in this self-portrait essayistic register until her death in 2019, including the Oscar-nominated Faces Places (2017).