Sweetgrass
Filmmaker: Llisa Barbash & Lucien Castain-Taylor
USA / 2009 / 101 minutes / English
Opening Weekend Date: 22 April 2011
This breathtaking chronicle follows an ever-surprising group of modern-day cowboys as they lead an enormous herd of sheep up and then down the slopes of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana on their way to market, one final time
Filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor spent three summers in Montana documenting the process by which sheep are raised, ranched, sheered, and driven hundreds of miles to graze in high pastures of Sweet Grass county. It was a journey of almost 300 kilometers in the extreme northwest of the United States, 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
"A one-of-a-kind experience. At once epic-scale and earthbound" Variety