Plot Summary

Here is a film that is, to say the least, singular. A fiction filmed under Giscard, in two farming families, one in Brittany and the other in Languedoc. One sees the Catholic mass and the mass of the television news, one hears the Benedicite and the Internationale, a rural class struggle is played out, daily peasants against the aristos in the middle of a hunt...Chronicle of the Sad Years tells the story of the new forms of subjection suffered by the workers of the land, discovering the perverse effects of the CAP and the growing influence of agribusiness. A film in which the director, Alain Aubert-Dechartre, stages a historical turning point, the forced conversion of peasants into technicians of farms of which they will be the first to be exploited