Hacker Cinema
Sweetgrass
2009 · Film · documentary · 101 min
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
There's a very beautiful documentary from 2011 about open range sheep grazing in Montana, called SWEETGRASS. It's un-narrated, mostly just lets things speak for themselves.
http://www.pbs.org/pov/sweetgrass/
Also I think throughout Montana there are free grazing areas for sheep. I think that's what you're seeing in the fantastic documentary called Sweetgrass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9iah71iPQ
I wonder if many of the issues described aren't specific to the treatment of immigrant workers, but something inherent to modern ranching in the American West. "Sweetgrass" is a phenomenal 2009 documentary about American sheepherding culture in Montana:
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass” follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
http://sweetgrassthemovie.com
It's an unflinching movie that captures the beauty of the landscape, the desperation of the herders, and a sense of place and belonging. It also includes the most heartfelt swearing scene I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCbV58dzmBc. It's probably best to start with the official trailer, though, to give some context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9iah71iPQ.