A Day in the Country

A vital work of political portraiture that was suppressed for 28 years, A Day in the Country finds Raymond Depardon on the campaign trail with French presidential candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s Minister of Economy and Finance at the time. Giscard d’Estaing’s campaign self-consciously emulated American political campaigns of the day, and Depardon appropriately applies the tools of direct cinema to give us a probing, intimate look at the candidate on the cusp of power. Giscard d’Estaing went to court to have the film banned for what he saw as an unflattering depiction, but Depardon’s first feature-length documentary now stands today as a timeless and enthralling work on the French political class of the 1970s.