Cousin Jules (1972-Restored)

Le Cousin Jules (English: Cousin Jules) is a 1972 Documentary Film by Dominique Benicheti.

Filmmaker Dominique Benichetti, who died in 2011, was in his 20s when he began working on “Cousin Jules,” and spend five years recording the daily lives of two French farmers who live alone in the countryside. There is almost no dialogues, and there is no music. This is quiet study of French rural life. An ode to rural France and the simple joys of life.

The film captures the daily routine and rituals of Jules, a blacksmith, living with his wife, Felice, on a small farm in the French countryside. Both were born in 1891, but they represent a way of life that is much older. Jules, a blacksmith, works with a hand-cranked bellows and a battered metal stove, hammering out hasps and hinges with an ease and precision that represent generations of handed-down know-how. Jules and Félicie are residents of what is sometimes called “la France profonde,” a steadfast agricultural domain that has existed in parallel, and sometimes in opposition, to the industry and cosmopolitanism of Paris and other French cities.