A beautiful experiment in neorealism and even cinéma verité. Rouquier, a director of documentaries, had for years been following the fates of his country cousins on their farm in Aveyron, south-central France. He wrote a dramatic script which featured the Rouquier family and hired them as actors; the result is a lyrical documentary of a year in the life of a farm family as seen through the loving and curious eyes of the artist. The familiar gestures of farm life, from kneading the dough to reaping the harvest, and the swaying of jonquils in the breeze, are depicted in select detail. Stunning stop-motion photography of clouds, shadows and bursting seedlings emphasizes the passing of time over four seasons. It is the effect of time itself-i.e. modernization-on the lives of humans that is the subject of Farrebique (and even more so of the 1983 sequel, Biquefarre).