In the French countryside during World War I, a gamekeeper and his wife raise their two sons as well as three foster children from Paris who came to live with them at the outset of the war. The children live a life of school, play, and discovery, though month by month the distant war creeps closer to the village, and to the two children who will soon be old enough to enlist.

This seven-episode television mini-series was Pialat’s second venture into narrative film and may well be one of his greatest works. “The spirit of the Renoirs—both Auguste, the father, and his son, the filmmaker Jean—suffuses the film, with nods to the lyrical flow of time amid verdant splendor and to the upstairs-downstairs politics of The Rules of the Game. Pialat’s style, with sinuous long takes and probing zooms and pans, embraces broad swaths of action with alert patience. Yet, in Pialat’s view, life in the rustic village is rough and violent, filled with smacks, fistfights, and gunplay” -Richard Brody, The New Yorker.”

There will be an intermission.