A small group of peasants warily collect wood in the forest. The poverty and desperation is clear in their faces. A voiceover alerts us that the law has turned this simple act of survival into an illegal act of wood theft. The peasants, sensing a disturbance, look around nervously. Riders ominously appear in the distance.

The voiceover, quoting Montesquieu, tells us that there are two types of corruption: one where the people do not follow the law and the other where the law corrupts the people. The riders charge at the peasants and brutally cut them down.

We might expect a film about Karl Marx to open with exploited factory workers toiling in nineteenth century industrial misery. That Raoul Peck’s new feature film, The Young Karl Marx, instead decides to lead with a more bucolic scene is a fitting biographical touch. One of Marx’s first forays into journalism (from which the voiceover is taken) was an investigation into wood theft in the Rhineland, an experience that put the philosophy graduate in the “embarrassing position” — he later recalled — “of having to discuss what is known as material interests.”