Modern Life is the final documentary by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret dedicated to farmers. Drawing on their experience, they capture the authenticity of farmers as rarely seen on screen. This moving film speaks with great calmness about our roots and the future of those who live from the land. ​

The final chapter of the Profiles Farmers trilogy, Modern Life is also one of the clearest expressions of Raymond Depardon’s artistic style. It reflects his repeated return to the rural world from which he came and speaks in a restrained tone about the disappearing way of life he followed for a decade, the fragile language through which it survives, and the uncertain future of those who work the land. The prologue and epilogue, composed as matching forward and reverse tracking shots along narrow mountain roads, create the impression of a world coming into being and then receding from view.
With astonishing naturalness, Depardon’s camera leads us into farmhouses and captures, in an elegant rhythm, winter settling silently over a rural world that seems inseparable from the origins of human life. A thoughtful portraitist, he visits farmers who have become the last descendants of a vanishing history and records with honesty the quiet voices of people who rarely speak. Landscapes and faces each generate their own rhythm, framed with a firm photographic precision. Conceived as an archive of human life, the twilight world of Modern Life moves us so deeply because Depardon commits his inner self to the film without restraint or pretense.

• ProducerClaudine NOUGARET
• Edit Simon JACQUET
• Sound Claudine NOUGARET

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