Before the year 2000, Raymond Depardon decided to film the neglected agriculture of the mountain regions. In this first chapter, he opens the doors to several family farms in Lozère, Haute-Saône, Ardèche, and Haute-Loire. A form of cinema conceived above all as an art of time, patience, and the recording of traces left by human lives. 

As the new millennium approached, Raymond Depardon resolved to document the reality of France’s marginalized countryside. The project would take shape as the Profiles Farmers series, beginning with The Approach. Raised in a rural community by a farmer father, Depardon turns his camera toward elderly livestock farmers living in remote mountain regions of southern France. Returning to his own roots in the agricultural world, he enters family farms in Lozère, Haute-Saône, Ardèche, and Haute-Loire in the first chapter of this monumental undertaking. The film quietly guides us into a rapidly vanishing world, one often misunderstood and pushed to the margins.
The circumstances of French farmers are not so different from our own. They briefly attract media attention only when climate disasters or livestock epidemics strike, while otherwise remaining largely unseen. Profiles Farmers: The Approach confronts the existence of rural communities obscured by the splendor of modern civilization and slowly passing out of view. In a tender yet elegiac tone, Depardon calmly observes farmers tending small herds of cattle and sheep while facing the sale of their land, the rigid demands of labor, and the inevitability of aging and loss. Through this restrained, patient, and unhurried journey into the heart of rural life, the film also becomes a meditation on human solitude.

• ProducerClaudine NOUGARET
• Edit Roger IKHLEF
• Sound Claudine NOUGARET

Les Films du Losange | Hussein AKBARALY | h.akbaraly@filmsdulosange.fr