Sweetgrass

and call it beautiful, then I can see enjoying this film. Yes, it is well done....The camera work is really wonderful. What I'm not seeing is how this is anything but what it should be, an anti wool clothing piece. Good god, they abuse the sheep with shears and send them stripped into the snowy winter. Not a single scene where these guys treat any of these animals with respect.

Sorry, I'm actually watching it right now, and I understand there is ignorance at play, but these are horrible human beings.

Enjoy the "Magnificent... Wonderful... Astonishingly beautiful..." "Nature overwhelms the screen and even minds."

Really?

The reviewer Brian criticizes this movie for not having a plot. That is like criticizing shoes for not being useful as a hat. Brian, you are a fool. This is a fantastic documentary. Yes, it does not have a plot. OK. It is not supposed to have a plot. But it does provide a view of the interplay between sheep, herders, and terrain that you will never see anywhere else without actually doing herding yourself. Highly recommended (unless you want a movie with a plot, in which case you should seek one out to watch instead of watching this).

My children keep demanding to see this movie over and over again. I wish there were more documentaries like this about other things we sometimes hear about but never see.

In Montana, ranchers are caring for their sheep. They get sheared. They get fed. There are births. After the winter, the ranchers take the herd through the summer pasteurs on public lands in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. It is 2003 and it is the last band of sheep.

This is a little zen. It brings the audience into the sheep ranch. It takes us into the herd. I don't even want to have the ranchers talk. The main drawback is that it is not necessarily a 100 minutes worth of attention. I got antsy by the midway point. It would be a better hour-long TV show. The scenery is epic. It has beautiful vast vistas and also the gritty small pictures.

Sweetgrass is a documentary, literally: a document of a particular place, time and events. There's no narration, no host or guide, and seemingly no attempt to edit the footage to tell a story. Each scene appears to be chosen because it illuminates the subject, rather than for drama.

The camera records a group of sheep farmers and herders preparing a flock and getting them across the mountains. The focus is on everyday details of animal tending and herding, straightforward and unsentimental. The people working with the sheep seem mostly unconscious of the cameras, just going about their business. It's like seeing into another life.

Of course, it's another life that's centered around sheep. If that sounds boring, this probably isn't the film for you, because that's all there is to it, and it's slow-paced. It's very different from Discovery Channel style documentaries that try to teach and entertain. There's no Mike Rowe here to relate everything he's doing to you so that you can understand what's going on.

But there's something to be said for just watching things happen.

The movie isn't trying to reach out and explain itself to you, and that enables it to draw you in, if you're willing to go along for the ride.

Have disagree with the reviewer who said this was not an accurate portrayal of sheep and shepherds. There are different management practices and this movie depicted one of them. These folks shear in late winter and lamb in the spring. Shearing before lambing is done for several reasons--less moisture in the barn from long, wet wool; easier for the lambs to find the udder when it isn't buried in wool. In my experience with sheep, I've found that ewes definitely find their lambs both by sound and by smell. That's why they are put in small pens, called jugs, for a day or so after lambing so that they can bond and learn to recognize each other's unique sound and smell. That's why the ewes will reject any lamb that doesn't smell or sound like their own. I thought the movie was beautifully filmed and accurately showed the hard and sometimes frustrating work that goes into managing a large range flock.