I, Pierre Rivière, Having Butchered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… carefully assembles multiple perspectives on the infamous countryside murders that it re-enacts, an unusual approach that illustrates the ways that narrative produces truth. Allio shot the film entirely on location, using farmers from the Normandy region where the violence occurred. After far more than simply a grisly retelling of the grim events, Allio's film reflects on the deeper patterns of rural life imprinted on the land and its customs – the passing of the seasons, the raising of livestock, the harvesting of the crops – revealing the amazing continuity of these rhythms and traditions that stretch back from the 1830s to the present day. A haunting and beautiful pastoral epic that anticipates Ermanno Olmi's Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978), I, Pierre Rivière… also offers a profound mediation on history la longue durée, and the inherent instability of fiction and non-fiction within the cinema.