Landes

A few good berets in the film Landes (among a multitude of casquettes...).

In 1920 Liena Duprat just lost her husband, owner of vast plantations of pine trees in the Landes. Set in the 1920s, at a time when Gallic agricultural laborers were not yet paid as salaried workers, and when electricity was slowly making its way to the nation’s more remote regions, the scenario follows the travails of recent widow Liena, who inherits her husband’s vast estate of resin-producing trees, as well as his plans to wire up the surrounding countryside.

An intriguing tale of French rural history is handled with a very stolid sense of academism in Landes, the debut feature from director Francois-Xavier Vives.