French movie charts half a century on a dairy farm

The plight of French farmers is a well-trodden path in French cinema, with the main target often on the stricken household companies that fashionable life has left apart.

In his groundbreaking trilogy “Farmer profiles”, Raymond Depardon adopted eighty-year-old farmers and shepherds who earned their dwelling in distant areas affected by rural exodus. Others have examined the injury brought on by intensive farming and the agrochemical business, destroying livelihoods and bankrupting household farms.

There at the moment are fewer than half one million French farmers, a fraction of their post-war whole. However their fading world nonetheless occupies an outsized place within the nationwide psyche, steeped in nostalgia for France’s rural previous and tinged with guilt over the hardships skilled by so many.

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“The Bertrand Farm”, which hits French cinemas subsequent week, tells a distinct story: that of the profitable transition of a dairy farm to modernity amongst three generations of the identical household.

The goal is to not belittle or ignore the struggles of others, says Perret, who co-wrote the movie along with his companion Marion Richoux, however to point out an agriculture that’s each viable and engaging, and that deeply impacts the setting respects.

Financial success, human failure

Early within the movie, we meet a trio of shirtless brothers smashing rocks with sledgehammers to put the muse for his or her future parlor. Their lean, muscular our bodies point out an austere lifetime of laborious toil and austerity.

The black-and-white footage comes from a 1972 documentary filmed by the French nationwide broadcaster within the Alpine hamlet the place Perret grew up, a stone’s throw from the Bertrand brothers’ dairy farm.

Twenty-five years later, Perret borrowed a digicam to movie the identical trio as they ready to move the farm on to their cousin and his spouse. He resumed filming one other quarter of a century later, with a 3rd era of Bertrands now on the helm, earlier than merging the three eras into an enchanting chronicle of half a century of rural resilience and adaptation.

After they move on the baton in 1997, the three brothers go away behind a wholesome enterprise, however at a excessive value: all three have remained single and put apart their private ambitions to stay tied to their nation and nation by means of a lifetime of non-public sacrifice. cattle.

Because the mustachioed André, the movie’s standout character, says in a sobering reflection, their story is one in all “financial success and human failure.”

It has taken a 3rd era of the Bertrand household to lastly discover a more healthy steadiness between work and household life, aided by a formidable array of machines which have modified the character of their work past recognition.

“The younger individuals hardly do any handbook work today,” mutters André, bent over his stick, nonetheless working in the newest photos of the movie. “However they definitely know a factor or two about machines.”

A protected bubble

André and his brothers present lots of the movie’s most adorable scenes, whether or not it is expertly wielding a sickle, massaging a hen or calling every of their hundred cows by identify.

However Perret’s movie doesn’t harbor nostalgia for occasions passed by. It opens with a shot of a model new milking machine, which the retired Hélène, from the second era of the Bertrand household, jokingly introduces as her “alternative” – one that may make her son’s work much less tiring and repetitive.

The intention is to impress viewers, says Perret, by introducing a type of agriculture that matches in with society and the technological developments that form our world.

“In lots of different sectors, mechanization has led to job losses and deterioration of working circumstances,” he says. “On this case, evidently robots might be an amazing assist to people, taking up among the most exhausting duties in a career that requires presence 24 hours a day, 12 months a yr.”

For all of the speak of success, the movie makes no secret of the bodily toll on the Bertrands. André’s two brothers died simply weeks after their retirement. Their nephew solely lived to be 50, leaving Hélène with three kids and a farm to run.

The truth that the farm is enabled owes a lot to its privileged location within the protected cheese area of Haute-Savoie, house of Reblochon cheese.

The designation implies that their milk is offered at twice the worth of milk from the plains or industrial farms. They primarily function in a bubble, protected against the market forces that go away numerous different farmers on the whims of risky costs over which they haven’t any management.

Toiling with a goal

Within the 25 years since he first filmed The Farm, Perret has constructed up a physique of socially oriented work, typically teaming up with muckraking journalist and politician François Ruffin to show the worst penalties of unbridled capitalism. His movies give attention to the human influence of financial and social transformations and make clear areas of resistance in opposition to the coercive forces of globalized economies.

He says rising up subsequent to the Bertrand household helped form his outlook and pursuits.

“In all my movies I’ve tried to query our relationship to work, the which means of what we do, how we are able to enhance circumstances and what could be carried out to guard our surroundings,” he says. “These are all issues which can be on the core of their lives.”

To qualify for the Reblochon label, the farm is topic to strict pointers that exclude non-natural feed for the livestock and require the animals to graze within the mountain pastures for no less than 150 days per yr.

“It would not fairly qualify as natural farming, however it comes very shut,” says Perret, highlighting the Bertrands’ function in shaping and preserving the pristine setting across the hamlet the place he nonetheless lives – each a present from the character as a legacy of their laborious labor.

“The cash we earn is sufficient to reside on,” says one of many brothers midway by means of the movie, as he enjoys the view after a day of toiling on his scythe. “The true satisfaction comes from retaining our nature clear and wholesome.”

“La Ferme des Bertrand” (89min) opens in French cinemas on Wednesday, January 31.