A French-Tunisian production, The Shadow of the Earth portrays the demise of an isolated Tunisian border-camp community consisting of a patriarch, his son, nephews and their families. As wheat provisions slowly run out and the last cattle are stricken by disease, the men leave to join the army or try their luck abroad. Only the chief and his daughter-in-law remain. When she learns that her husband's body has been returned from abroad, she too leaves to retrieve the coffin. On the film's presentation at the 1982 London Film Festival, John Gillett wrote, “Louhichi renders these events in a flow of distantly shot images (each sequence snapping shut on a quick fade); but the harsh lyricism is not without humor, as when a TV set with its shocking, heathen images of a remote world is set up under the night sky. When the wife leaves for the city...we share her experiences in a wonderfully shot bus journey.... Behind these open, often ravishing images, an unseen military presence never seems far away.” (Presented at Cannes, Montreal and Chicago Film Festivals, 1982)