Sweetgrass

A group of herders takes a flock of sheep to the summer pastures in Montana. The journey runs into the mountains and takes weeks. The film covers it: shearing, lambing, loading, walking, camp, rain, the threat of bears and the return. There is no narrator, no interview, no music. There is only the sound of sheep, the wind and what the herders say to each other. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash direct. It was made at a university's sensory ethnography laboratory. The shooting ran over several years and the crew walked with the flock; there are hundreds of hours of recordings. What it shows is the last state of a trade. Drives of this kind have almost vanished in America, and the journey in the film is among the last made in that region. The best known scene is a herder calling his mother from the mountain and weeping; the man cannot manage the flock, and what he says is the only direct statement in the film. The narrative does not make the animals appealing; death, sickness and slaughter are present in detail. The sound design is its real instrument; even when the camera is far away the sound is close, the herders having been recorded on radio microphones. Who it is for: viewers who like observational documentary and slow cinema. Who it is not for: there is no narrative, the pace is very slow, and some scenes contain the death of animals.