“A riveting study in the purest documentary tradition” is how Variety described de Putter's look at the final year of his own parents' farm, but the film's connection between landscape and art is best described by its opening dedication: “For my father, who made me love the land, and my mother, who made me love the cinema.” Beginning with his father's before-dawn cup of coffee on January 1, 1992, de Putter records a calendar year of plantings and harvests, winter snows and autumn lights, quiet conversations, and those moments when the only sound is from the wind, the only movement from the clouds above, or the harvests below. It's Been a Lovely Day is a portrait of a fading way of life, but another feature is those famous Dutch rays of light, with farmers in dawn's near-darkness, or trees swaying in summer breezes, as painterly as any Rembrandt or Van Gogh.