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A Day in the Country
Partie de campagne
This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.
Conceived as a short feature, the project had nearly finished production in 1936 when Renoir was called away for The Lower Depths. Shooting was abandoned then, but the film was completed with the existing footage by Renoir’s team and released in its current form in 1946, after the director had already moved on to Hollywood. The result is a warmly humanist vignette that ranks among Renoir’s most lyrical works, with a love for nature imbuing its every beautiful frame.
Bio Jean Renoir
French director and screenwriter Jean Renoir (1894-1979) was the youngest son of the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. His films, in both silent and later eras, were noted for their realism and strong narrative and include such classics as La Grande Illusion (1937), La règle du jeu (1939), and The River (1951).
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- This film was #62 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025