A continuation and the ending of Operai, contadini (Workers, Peasants), based on Elio Vittorini’s Le donne di Messina (Women of Messina, 1949 – 64), recounting the attempts of a metaphorically ​‘shipwrecked’ group of men and women to construct a new life among the rubble of post-war Italy. In Umiliati Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub isolate the chapters in which the members of the new-born community are brutally confronted with the outside’s economic and political laws and find themselves being submitted to a tribunal that has no other purpose than their humiliation.  

* Umiliati: che niente di fatto o toccato da loro, di uscito dalle mani loro, risultasse esente dal diritto di qualche estraneo   

In the Portuguese Alentejo region it is said that, when something is lost, those who are looking should start to walk back to the beginning. Farpões Baldios gives an account of dispossession and occupation, of wastelands that were once part of the commons, of the people who have been living and working on these lands without ever owning them, and of their struggles for justice. Some of the people who sowed carnations and spread resistance in their own words tell their story to the youngsters of today.

* Farpões Baldios