Film Forum

WINNER Mélies Award for Best French Film – 2000

Agnès Varda’s THE GLEANERS AND I returns to Film Forum screens nearly 25 years after its U.S. theatrical premiere as part of our regular series, the Young Film Forum (YFF) Archive Dive.

Recently named on Sight and Sound's 2022 list of “The Greatest Films of All Time,” The New York Times' list of “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century,” and Time Magazine’s “100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades,” by Stephanie Zacharek, THE GLEANERS AND I is a playful, political, and poetic portrait of life on the margins. Turning her compassionate, ever-curious lens on scavengers, artists, and herself, THE GLEANERS AND I continues in the essayist tradition of Varda's earlier films—a warm and witty discourse on, among other things, the nature of our consumerist society and the role of creativity in survival.

Mark your calendars for our comprehensive Agnès Varda retrospective, opening on March 13, 2026!

“THE GLEANERS AND I takes its title and inspiration from an 1867 painting by Jean-François Millet that shows three women in a wheat field, stooping to pick up sheaves and kernels left behind after the harvest... The painting sent Ms. Varda, a warm, intrepid woman and one of the bravest, most idiosyncratic of French filmmakers, on a tour of her own... She is a constant, funny presence in the film, providing piquant voice-over narration and allowing herself visual and verbal digressions on the state of her aging hands, the water damage on her ceiling... THE GLEANERS AND I is both a diary and a kind of extended essay on poverty, thrift, and the curious place of scavenging in French history and culture... studded with found metaphors and serendipitous insights.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Originally programmed by Karen Cooper and Mike Maggiore for Film Forum 

2000     82 MIN.     FRANCE     JANUS FILMS     IN FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

THE YFF ARCHIVE DIVE is a new screening series programmed especially for YFF, curated from FF’s rich 55-year history of first-run premieres. The series introduces important, challenging works and underseen masterpieces to members in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Learn about YFF here. YFF-eligible members, please email jesse@filmforum.org for details on this and future YFF gatherings.

Born in Los Angeles, Carrie Rickey is an award-winning film critic, art critic, and film historian. She was the film critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years and has also written for Artforum, Art in America, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Politico. A Complicated Passion, her biography of Agnès Varda, was shortlisted for best book of 2024 by the American Library in Paris.

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