D. W. Griffith’s 1909 short film A Corner in Wheat, a Biblical tale of avarice, divine retribution, and the prolonged suffering of the masses, is the prelude to this political film essay. Straub-Huillet offer a dialectical montage of cause (capitalist greed) and effect (the poverty of the farmer and the urban underclass), and draw from excerpts of their earlier work: Moses and Aaron, Fortini/Cani and From the Cloud to the Resistance.

In the last feature-length collaboration between Straub and Huillet before Huillet's death in 2006, villagers from across the length of Italy—a peasant, a postmaster, a theater director, a mayor, a rope maker—gather in the Tuscan countryside to recite the five final scenes of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Published in 1947, just two years after the Holocaust and the Second World War and two years before Pavese’s suicide, the Dialogues offer a series of meditations on human destiny, both comical and tragic, between ancient Greek mythological figures. Desperate in their hunger for immortality, mortals are blind to the gift of being human—of their ability to experience joy and suffering; to feel a passing breeze or the touch of another body; to name, remember, and act.