All the women - young and old alike - work nonstop, from dawn to dusk, and worry about the arrival of winter.

Filmed from the point of view of a subjective camera by a young female ethnologist, Land of Women offers a sensitive and poetic immersion in the life of four generations of women during harvesting season. We share their rare intimacy and gradually grow attached to them.

Director Marianne Chaud

Marianne is an ethnologist, with a diploma from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her doctoral thesis focused on studying the relationship between the people of the Himalayan region of Zanskar, in northern India, and their land. She has returned to this area regularly over the past seven years, spending three to seven months in different villages, at different times of the year. She lived with Zanskari families, learned their language, adopted their customs and behaviors, and worked alongside them, at domestic and farming tasks. She observed and questioned constantly, forging strong emotional links with the residents; her profound personal experience furthered her intellectual interest.
In 2004, she participated as a scientific specialist in the Ushuaïa-Natures TV show on the Ladakh-Zanskar, a popular prime time documentary series produced for TF1. Alongside Nicolas Hulot, the host of the show, she discussed the principles of Buddhism, the nomadic way of life of the Ladakhi villagers.
In 2005, she submitted a documentary project to ZED, about the lives of two young Zanskari girls. The project was accepted, and in 2006 she worked on the production of the film Becoming a Woman in Zanskar, as co-author and production assistant. The 85-minute film was broadcasted on France 5 in May 2007, on SWR in Germany, Discovery HD International, NHK in Japan, and in 15 other countries including the US, Spain, Italy, Austria, Holland, Finland, Norway, etc.
In conjunction with her ethnological studies, Marianne Chaud pursued ethnographical film classes at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.