Sweetgrass

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last sheepherders to trail their flocks up into Montana’s Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture. Without commentary, this astonishingly beautiful film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, climate and landscape, and vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed. "In the summer of 2003, a group of shepherds took a herd of sheep one final time through the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, in the extreme northwest of the United States. It was a journey of almost 300 kilometers through expansive green valleys, by fields of snow, and across hazardous, narrow ridges—a journey brimming with challenges. The aging shepherds do their very best to keep the hundreds of sheep together; the panoramic high mountains are teeming with hungry wolves and grizzly bears." —International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam 

Director:

Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor