There is little dialogue in this documentary from Lucien Castaing-Taylor - and what there is can't always be made out - nor is there any music.
All we get are 3,000 sheep and a Montana setting, where herders on horseback and their dogs shepherd their huge flock 150 miles to common land in the Beartooth mountains for summer grazing.
Castaing-Taylor and producer Isla Barbash are Harvard academics who would rather be called "recordists" than film-makers, so they tell you nothing about this dangerous journey that can't be expressed through images. So beautiful and so impressive is their "visual anthropology" that Sweetgrass is unforgettable. The sight of the sheep progressing down the main street of a small township with no one else in view is a scene that stands out, but there are many others.
The question is, what will become of the herders and their arduous way of life? This is the concern of the director, or rather chief recordist, who talks of his three years making the film, and evokes the twilight of the American West. He captures a veteran among the herders, stoically doing his job, whom John Ford would have struggled to make more expressive.
I have no doubt that, come the end of the year, Sweetgrass will be on the "10 Best" lists. It is that memorable for pictorial, cultural and even moral reasons.
Opens tomorrow
Sweetgrass
