Trivia

The basis for the film consists of two texts: a letter sent by Friedrich Engels to his disciple Karl Kautsky, and Egyptian intellectual Mahmoud Hussein's "Class Struggles in Egypt". At the center of each text is a discussion of the people's relationship to the land. What Straub and Huillet have done is to film the specific places mentioned in each text: for the Engels section we see shots of Paris, Mottreff, Lyon, and Harville; for the Hussein section we see the area around Cairo; and these shots are synced with a voice-over reading of the texts.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.