On a farm in the Pyrenees, a few plain, functional buildings, some pieces of equipment lying in the mud. In the cow barn, Sebastien Itard is hard at work. When the filmmaker first met him, he said it was like seeing his own father: the same pinched expression and bentover posture from hard work. His father was also a livestock farmer, who took his own life after he got into economic trouble – just like 400–800 other farmers in France every year. With half a million euros of debt on his shoulders, Sebastien Itard has a growing family with soon four children to feed. His retired father still helps out on the farm but is constantly criticizing him. SONS OF THE LAND follows a year–and-a-half of dramatic events on the Itard farm. In between, the filmmaker often flashes back to his own family’s story, thus drawing parallels between the fates of farmers and problematizing an agricultural system that lets them work like slaves for 15 hours a day for a monthly income of 150 euro.
