Joris Ivens’ documentary Zuiderzee (1930) told a story almost too good to believe: a massive project, begun in the early 1920s and completed ten years later, had 10,000 men finishing a drainage project to reclaim fertile land from the sea for agricultural use – new wealth for the world in the throes of the Depression, a harvest with all-time beautiful timing for suffering mankind.

What happened next led to a renewed version of Ivens’ film, Nieuwe gronden. Wheat, instead of being harvested, is withheld from the market to keep the price high. Headlines: Grain Market collapses. Millions of tons of hidden grain lie rotting.

There is too much grain and not enough work. The point of view rises to global scale: marches against hunger in London, the fluctuation in wheat prices. The director’s material, biological – and let’s add, magical – touch in showing nature’s processes continue into the mystery of world economics: the tragic and senseless obscenity of class realities and the outrageous incommensurability between the riches of the world and the capitalist system. The French censors defined it almost too accurately: “trop de réalité”.

Along with the forthcoming The Spanish Earth, Nieuwe gronden is the greatest Joris Ivens film of the 1930s. Like the Spanish film, it’s an elegy for human work and a masterpiece of creative dramaturgy, proceeding with one camera for the earth, a second for the sea and a third identify- ing with humans and the machines. Enriching his creative scale, the celebrated cinematographer and director added the art of collage to his vocabulary: news- reels and archival footage – ever growing pieces of human testimony – grow into a landmark montage of ideas. Nieuwe gronden is a treasure of human and social truths lying hidden and locked away and, inseparably, a close study of the relativity of truth – a masterpiece of dramatic irony.