Sweetgrass

Ilisa Barbash and I began work on this film in the spring of 2001. We were living in Colorado, and heard about these Norwegian- and Irish- American sheepherders in Montana, who were among the last to drive their flocks of sheep long distances – about 150 miles each year, all of it on hoof – up to the mountains for summer pasture. We met during lambing, and were so taken with the magnitude of their lives – both their allure and their arduousness – that we have ended up working together ever since. SWEETGRASS is one of nine films to emerge from the footage we have shot in the intervening years, and the only one not intended principally for gallery viewing. As they were edited, the films seem to have become as much about the sheep as their herders, and the humans and animals that populate them morph and commingle in ways that have taken us by surprise. If in the end SWEETGRASS is about any thing, it is perhaps what are at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the pastoral, and a life world based on a propinquity between nature and culture that has been integral to the fabric of human history but which is now emphatically on the wane. (Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

In the presence of Véréna Paravel und Stephanie Spray.