Shot in the summer of 1980, this film from longtime directorial partners Straub and Huillet investigates the changing relationship between people, the land, and society in France and Egypt. The formal and structural 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 Mottreff, Lyons, and Harville; for the Hussein section we see the area around Neguib; and these shots are synced with a voice-over reading of the texts. What emerges is a document that functions as a history of Marxist thought, a landscape film, and as commentary on current French and Egyptian society.