“Zuiderzee portrays the procedure used in the enormous project of draining an inlet to create new land. The project had not been completed yet; and so, while I continued working on Zuiderzee, I was able to make two other films. The shooting of Zuiderzee was assisted by a group formed around Filmliga and my other films for the worker’s union. We wouldn’t ever define ourselves as a production group, because we have always considered ourselves individuals united by friendship and by common ideals. The final conquest of the first vast area took place on the 28th of May 1932, exactly two minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon. The overall cost of the project at that point amounted to one thousand million florins. Ten thousand men had worked, in two shifts, for over ten years to obtain this new land. But in these ten years the world had changed a lot, and so our story asked for dramatic conclusion, an unexpected third act. In fact thousands of men that had worked on the project suddenly found themselves unemployed. The first triumphal crop was sold below cost, as one of the many cases of overproduction in the world market, that had already desperately attempted to resolve its problems by selling coffee in Brazil and sinking ships loaded with grain. The best way to analyze the strange ‘logic’ of this historical shift and to represent it vividly was on film. (Joris Ivens, Io-Cinema, Longanesi, Milano, 1979)