“Behind time, time comes” interlaced with folk songs, narrates the rhythms of rural life, where time and its weight, shape and define the landscape, as well as the lives that compose it. Accompanying the reminiscences of a group of women from the parish of Dornelas, Sever do Vouga, Portugal.

Yahya, a village youth makes a great effort to improve his family life. A decision that will make him pay a heavy price.

In Canada, the village of Val Gagné is facing a rural exodus. Life seems to be dissolving, the future is uncertain. But these Franco-Ontarian villagers are surprised by a wind of renewal. A wind that will give them hope.

A young family with a baby is visiting elderly parents living in a remote northern village. Suddenly, their child becomes sick with dysentery. There is no necessary medicine in the village, the telephone line was cut off, and the roads were washed out due to the spring flood. The young father Vanya decides to get to the regional center on his own in order to call a Sunrise to the village. But the road ahead is long and dangerous.

This short documentary illustrates rural French Canadian life in the early 1940s. The film follows Alexis Tremblay and his family through the busy autumn days as they bring in the harvest and help with bread baking and soap making. Winter sees the children revelling in outdoor sports while the women are busy with their weaving, and, with the coming of spring young and old alike repair to the fields once more to plough the earth in preparation for another season of varied crops. One of the first NFB films to be produced, directed, written and shot by women.

portrait of one aspect of rural life

Together, the three Bertrand brothers work their farm in a small Savoyard village. In 1972, they took the enormous risk to invest in the construction of an ultra modern stable for 82 milk cows. With modern organisation, they hoped to lead a better life. Almost 30 years later, the farm is successful. Their work is meticulous and the milk is graded top quality. The human cost is much more sombre. Indeed these thirty years can be summarised in one word : work. The brothers are bachelors and – each one now over sixty years old – a bitterness when they recall their past. The younger brother says it himself: "It's an economic success, but it's a human failure...".

An extraordinary and unexpected snapshot of rural life in wartime in which a young black girl is crowned Queen of the May.

Titou will soon be forty. He lives high up in a sheep shed in the Corbières mountains. With Soledad, who lives in a nearby caravan, they make their own wine, compose their music, live their love in step with the seasons – much as you might cultivate resistance.

Following a violent earthquake in the Lazio hinterland, Sebastiano is forced to go for a short stay in the large house of his aunt Lavinia and his cousin Milo, in full knowledge of himself. Coexistence will lead the two to relive past experiences, in a hostile and provincial reality.

Margaret Conneely was active in amateur filmmaking locally and internationally for nearly half a century, first joining a local Chicago camera club in 1949. Her son, John, stars in Saga of the First and Last, a short film about a boy, a gun and his first (and last) cigarette.

The reality of four rural women in the Metropolitan District of Quito. Despite their pain and difficulties, they have managed to forge a life that in maturity unfolds all the beauty of wisdom.

The owner of a ranch pretends to a woman who is in love with a young blacksmith and spur craftsman. Because of his jealousy, the owner threatens the young man to pay a high mortgage to continue living on his ranch.

The camera falls in love with the characters, the landscape and the objects and is installed with the tenderness that inoculates the life of the town itself. The camera is the thousand eyes of the gaze of a rigorous anthropologist, although in love, multiplying so as not to lose detail in 24 hours of people, activity, games, intimacy ... Recording every sound that pierces the oceanic silence of the countryside open.And night comes. And the gazpacho. And the party. You see.