Just as they previously did with Cesare Pavese in "From the Clouds to the Resistance", the Straubs bring to the screen Elio Vittorini, a great Italian writer to whom they remain true over a number of films. "Workers, Peasants" tells the story of a practical, political utopia: the attempt to create a new, different society among the Greeks immediately after the war. The subject is very dear to the Straubs. In their films, they repeatedly preoccupy themselves with questions on how we define a people and nature and what a people and nature really are. And no one has ever made comparably good films on that subject except, arguably, John Ford.