Sweetgrass. 2009. USA/France/UK. Directed by Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor. 35mm. 101 min.
An early landmark of sensory ethnographic cinema, Sweetgrass is an exquisitely observed and wholly unsentimental chronicle of the last sheep run across the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains of Montana. Shot over the course of three summers in the early 2000s, the film follows the rhythms by which sheep—3,000 deep, bleating, stubborn, and wayward—are raised, ranched, sheared, and shepherded across the mountain range for summer pasture. Without voiceover or commentary, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor capture the back-breaking labor of a disappearing kind unfolding under the sublime panoramas of Big Sky Country, and manage to trade nostalgia for startling intimacy and even inadvertent humor. Sweetgrass was presented at the 2009 Flaherty seminar organized by Irina Leimbacher; the film screens here in a 35mm print from MoMA’s collection.