Our Daily Bread / Under the Fig Trees
- This is a past program
Co-presented with the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Our Daily Bread (1934)
Struggling in the thick of the Depression, a young couple, John and Mary Sims (Karen Morley and Tom Keene), receive an unexpected offer to take over a farm. Working the land quickly proves overwhelming for the urbanites until they invite other displaced people to join a collective community to turn the farm around. Director King Vidor brings ample verve to this American pastoral as ordinary folk swelling with can-do spirit flock to the Sims’ experiment in share-and-share alike living. Just a touch of proto-noir shadow falls across the fields when Barbara Peppers’ platinum blonde attracts the husband’s eye but when a drought threatens, the community calls, and Vidor orchestrates a thrilling finale around, of all things, a communal irrigation project.
DCP, b&w, 80 min. Director: King Vidor. Screenwriter: King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, Barbara Pepper.
Under the Fig Trees (2021)
Beginning at sunrise, with the soft light cutting through the darkness, a crew of workers — women and men, old and young — begin their day working in a fig orchard. Closely following a group of teenage girls, filmmaker Erige Sehiri tenderly brings the everyday acts of labor and intergenerational workers into focus, as they flirt, converse and work among the trees for the day. This first feature is a stunning debut, one of tender moments, flowing with conversation and farming, that celebrates the mundane and the small moments that happen between people while they work.
DCP, color, 92 min. In Arabic with English subtitles. Director: Erige Sehiri. Screenwriter: Peggy Hamann, Ghalya Lacroix, Erige Sehiri. With: Fide Fdhili, Feten Fdhili, Ameni Fdhili.
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