Adiu monde offers a loving yet tongue-in-cheek reflection on the quest for "authenticity" in the Pyrenees, especially as this is absorbed and reinterpreted by the oft-photographed inhabitants themselves. Butchers, mechanics, farmers, and bystanders in the picture-postcard Aspe and Ossau valleys delight in recounting variations on the pastoral tale of a young shepherd who vanished and the shepherdess who followed him into the woods. A profoundly poetic work, infused with the ludic culture and storytelling traditions of the Pyrenees, Adiu monde explores its subjects’ nostalgia for the past as well as their joie-de-vivre in the present.