Shepherds

Directed by Sophie Deraspe, this Canadian French co production adapts Mathyas Lefebure's semi autobiographical book. Mathyas, a burnt out Montreal advertising copywriter, abandons his career to become a shepherd in Provence, meets Élise at a municipal office while trying to legalize his work permit, and the two are offered the job of taking a flock of more than eight hundred sheep high into the Alps for the summer. The real Lefebure worked in marketing and public relations, moved to France in 2004 after an existential crisis and became a shepherd, and wrote his book as a roman à clef, though Élise is an invention of the film and does not appear in it. The most concrete production detail is in the flock: three separate herds were used for the transhumance sequence, because the sense of distance and time the fictional story required could not be achieved with one, and the sheep were driven through cobbled city streets. It won Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, took four Iris Awards in Quebec for cinematography, editing, score and sound, and grossed over five hundred twenty thousand dollars in Quebec, strong for that market. Who it's for: Viewers drawn to stories of leaving a career for the land, and to films that treat landscape as a character. Who it's not for: Not for anyone wanting rural life romanticized, since the film is bracingly honest about how hard the work is.