Lights That Never Fail 1948    star_border 5.3
Documentary film shot in Brittany about lighthouses and lighthouse keepers on the island of Ouessant and coast of Finistere.

Farrebique, or the Four Seasons 1947    star_border 6.5
Farrebique, the first feature-length effort of French documentary filmmaker Georges Rouqier, is widely regarded as his finest film. Rouqier concentrates on a single French farm family, following them through the four seasons. As in the works of Robert Flaherty, the human characters and the land surrounding them are "one", and Rouqier never misses an opportunity to parallel their lives with the eons-old phases of nature. The final symbolic images of Spring, achieved through time-lapse photography, are almost unbearably beautiful. The winner of several festival awards, Farrebique nonetheless did not immediately result in an outpouring of financing for Rouqier's follow-up films (this was a common problem in the financially strapped French film industry of the 1940s). Perhaps as a result, Rouqier did not make his sequel, Biquefarre (filmed in the same region, with some of the same "actors"), until 1983.

Jeunes filles de France 1939
In 1939, the "Union des Jeunes Filles de France", a French communist movement, sponsored this documentary short constituting a tour de France of farms, factories and workshop where young women work, thus taking charge of their own destiny.