Paris. The summer of 1960. While war rages in Algeria and pre-independence Congo seethes with violence, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin send two women out into the streets of the city to interview passersby.

Rouch, whose previous groundbreaking films were shot in Africa, and Morin, an academic and writer, were experimenting with a new kind of documentary film about their own society that would reveal the innermost truth of peoples' lives.

From a simple starting question - Are you happy, sir? - CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER delves deeper and deeper into the lives of its characters. They include Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works grueling shifts in a Renault factory; Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Marilou, a young, beautiful and deeply depressed Italian immigrant. As the film progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER is a true landmark in film history. Rouch and Morin were among the first filmmakers to use hand held sync sound 16mm equipment. They also coined the term cinéma vérité to describe their approach, although their practice, placing people in situations and provoking responses, differs from what later came to be called vérité films. Their use of the urban landscape and groundbreaking cinematography (cameraman Raoul Coutard was among the crew members working on the film) deeply affected the French New Wave and much of subsequent documentary practice. The film's self-reflexive structure, in which Rouch and Morin screen the film for the participants to critique it on-screen, as well as their own reactions to the critique, is still, amazingly, contemporary.

More than 40 years later, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER remains as ambitious, forward-looking and powerful as the day it was first released.

"With CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER Jean Rouch proved that (in his own words) 'you can film anything anywhere.' The film that invented cinéma vérité and cinema-direct is as provocative now as it was forty years ago. Today we take the walking camera, portable sync-sound, and filming the intimacies of everyday life for-granted; in CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER you can see the filmic birth of these techniques. And see workers, deportees, Africans, intellectuals, students, and people on the street live the Parisian life in the summer of 1960." - Steven Feld, Editor of the book Ciné-Ethnography, by Jean Rouch, and Professor of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University

"I think the reason why CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER still works today, and is an important film, is that Rouch and Morin made a cinéma-vérité documentary which tries to include the truth of 'fiction.'" - Ellen Freyer, Author of the essay Chronicle of a Summer - Ten Years After, in The Documentary Tradition by Lewis Jacob

"What this film engages is humanity itself." - Roland Barthes

"The key cinema vérité film." - Brian Winston, Claiming the Real

"A seminal work!" - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"A fascinating piece of work and a seminal film in the history of documentary. Rouch and Morin offer a slice-of-life experience of the Parisian streets, serving as a model for many other filmmakers who would continue to explore the various possibilities of 'cinema verite.'" - Educational Media Reviews Online