Made in 1937 as the Spanish Civil War raged, this film follows Joris Ivens's camera into villages under Nationalist bombardment, where German warplanes cross the sky, explosions flash, and shell-shocked residents stagger out of damaged homes to grieve. Ernest Hemingway wrote and reads the narration himself, his flat Midwestern voice observing that death once came only when you were old or sick, but now it comes to an entire village at once. The film follows Republican soldiers defending Madrid and farmers in the Jarama valley trying to keep an irrigation project running even as the front line closes in, building its case that ordinary agricultural life and the war effort are inseparable. Shot as wartime propaganda to raise American support and funds for the Republican cause, it doubles as a document of a rural Spain that the war was erasing. The combination of Hemingway's writing, Ivens's direct camera work, and a score featuring Virgil Thomson makes it a landmark of committed nonfiction filmmaking.