The Gleaners and I

The Gleaners and I is a French documentary in which Agnès Varda turns her attention to people who collect what others have left behind. She travels from rural corners of France to Paris markets after closing time, meeting those who search harvested fields for leftover crops, recover discarded food and objects, or make art from waste. Some do it out of need, others by choice or as a form of protest. Varda also includes herself in the film, treating her own gathering of images as a kind of gleaning, and the documentary reflects on the old tradition of collecting leftover grain after harvest.

Agnès Varda directed and wrote the film. It is the eleventh of the fourteen films she directed, following Kung-Fu Master! and preceding Tribute to Zgougou the Cat. Varda appears on screen as herself, alongside Bodan Litnanski and François Wertheimer. The film runs eighty-two minutes and was produced in France by Ciné-Tamaris.

The Gleaners and I was released in July 2000. It holds a rating of 7.7 on IMDb from around ten thousand votes and a matching 7.7 on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes, while a critics' rating of 8.1 from forty-five reviews is somewhat higher. The film remains one of the better-known works from the later part of Varda's career.