The Land, adapted from a novel by the Marxist writer Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, is at once lyrical and harsh in telling of the problems of Egyptian peasants in the early 1930s. When a large landowner joins with the government to deprive the small farmers near him of their water rights, pressuring them to give way to a road to be built to his property, their resistance leads not to a utopian ending, but to disorganization and ruin. Nevertheless, this film celebrates the land and the future it holds for the dignity of the individual, and thus the collective. In the final scene, a lynching, the old peasant Abu Sweililm's blood leaves his mark on the earth; he dies with the earth in his hands. Chahine brings the epic to vivid, filmic life through the combination of rich detail and symbolic motif that is a staple of his cinema. Repeated Saturday, January 25.