The Gleaners and I is an intimate, picaresque inquiry into French life as lived by the country's poor and its provident, as well as by the film's own director, Agnès Varda. Varda's aesthetic, political, and finally moral focus is on gleaners, those individuals who pick at already-reaped fields for the odd potato or the leftover turnip, and who in previous generations were immortalized by the likes of the great painters Millet and Van Gogh. Varda investigates the reasons, ranging from economic desperation to quixotic impulse, that lead both the anonymous and the celebrated (including a famous chef) to sift through society's detritus. Along her journey, Varda constructs a portrait of France that is every bit as modern as the digital camera with which she gleans her images, and in the process comes up with her finest, most effective work since Vagabond.