CINEOS Premiere
The Gleaners and I
A filmmaker roams France meeting people who live off what others throw away — and, filming her own aging hands, quietly makes the discarded and the overlooked feel sublime.
It never performs emotion; it observes, deflects into humour, and lets the camera do the confessing, so Varda's wonder and mortality register in what she films rather than what she says. The film is warm and comfortable to inhabit, a curious guide leading you gently, though images of precarity and her own aging keep a low unease alive underneath. It withholds conventional catharsis, distributing feeling evenly as quiet affect rather than building toward release, and settles on you as a gentle, cumulative heaviness that doesn't quite lift.
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FAQ
Is this a political documentary?
It carries a real argument about waste and inequality, but it wears it lightly. It builds its case through curiosity and encounter rather than polemic, so the politics arrive as tenderness.
Why does she film herself so much?
Because she's a gleaner too — of images, of time, of a life nearing its end. Turning the camera on her own hands makes the whole film a quiet self-portrait about what remains.