Joris Ivens was perhaps never so close to any cause as that of the Loyalists in Spain, for which he risked his life and in support of which he made this milestone documentary. Contemporary Historians, a group of American writers and intellectuals including Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish, sponsored the film. The setting is the small Spanish village of Fuenteduena, forty miles southwest of Madrid, where villagers develop plans for the irrigation of land (recently confiscated from the feudal landowners) in order to grow food for the troops and civilians. Meanwhile, military forces take part in the defense of Madrid. Hemingway contributed the stark but poetic commentary and replaced Orson Welles' original reading with his own.