Sweetgrass
The most gorgeous anthropological study you’ll likely ever see, this mesmerizing 2009 verite doc by scholars-turned-filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor follows a party of mounted shepherds (they’re not cowboys, damn it) and their hardworking dogs as they drive a flock of 3,000 through summer pastures in Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. Unadorned by narration or any other music than the constant bleating of the sheep and the almost equally relentless profanity of their keepers, the film goes about as far as the medium could toward imparting a physical sense of the rigors and satisfactions of a vanishing way of life.
Credits
Directors:
- Lucien Castaing-Taylor
- Illisa Barbash
