[3] In 2002, Varda released a follow-up, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (French: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans après), in which she revisited some of the people and themes of this film.

For the film, Varda traveled throughout rural and urban France to document various types of gleaners who, whether due to necessity or for artistic or ethical reasons, gather crops left in the field after the harvest or food and objects that have been thrown out.

There are interviews with, among others, a Michelin 2-star chef who gleans and a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners; the owners of a few vineyards, among whom are psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and the great-grandson of physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey; artists that incorporate recycled materials into their work, including Louis Pons, who explains that junk is a "cluster of possibilities"; lawyers who discuss the French laws regarding gleaning versus abandoned property; and an urban gleaner named Alain, who has a master's degree and teaches French to immigrants.

In order to find the subjects, Varda claimed her method was to ask all the people she knew to talk to everyone—"the peasants, the owners, the farmers, the fruit growers—about our film.

Varda chose to put this footage in the finished film with a jazz music background, calling it "The Dance of the Lens Cap".

In the press kit, Varda wrote that she and her team would travel and shoot for roughly two weeks at a time and immediately proceed to edit while scouting for additional locations.

Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle argued that "Varda's subject matter is surprisingly rich, but it's her own energetic, curious nature that gives the film its snap.

"[10] In the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington wrote: "In its frames, we see [Varda's] empathy, skill, curiosity, wit, poetry and passion for life: everything she has gleaned from a lifetime of love and movies.

(p. 48)[13] Jake Wilson, on the other hand, conjectures that Varda, perhaps not fully realizing it, tapped into the cultural zeitgeist and constructed a film that "embodies a quasi-anarchist ethos" built on a "resistance to consumerism, a suspicion of authority, and a desire to reconnect politics with everyday life."

(p. 44)[13] Another factor that makes The Gleaners and I especially noteworthy in the context of cinematic history is the fact that a filmmaker of Varda's stature chose to abandon high-end film equipment for low-end digital video.

As she noted in an interview with Melissa Anderson for Cinéaste, "I had the feeling that this is the camera that would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958.