Filmmaker Ilisa Barbash in person Friday and Saturday March 12 & 13, 7:00 & 9:45 screenings

The tagline for the wonderful documentary Sweetgrass, the first essential movie of this young year, is “the last ride of the American cowboy.” [Perhaps] the word shepherd, with its pastoral evocations of maidens in pantaloons and lads with flutes, doesn’t have the necessary grit or mythic punch. But the quiet and cantankerous men in this movie, mostly in cowboy hats—one of which is charmingly ornamented with a sheep pin on the crown—are keeping and sometimes losing sheep as surely as Little Bo Peep did. Made by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the movie largely involves the enormous effort, along with the unintentional humor and grim realities, involved in driving some 3,000 sensationally noisy sheep (how do they sleep?) up a mountain for summer pasture. The movie truly belongs to the sheep, which turn out to be fascinating, almost hypnotic subjects for the camera, whether they’re comically bleating at one another like rush-hour subway riders or swarming across the range like a single organism. The filmmakers make brilliant use of extreme long shots throughout, inserting breathtaking panoramas into the mix that convey the surrounding grandeur even as the images also suggest that however much man tries to dominate nature, nature prevails. —Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Presented as part of the Film Society’s environmental film series with the generous support of the Goldman Environmental Prize.



Lucien Castaing-Taylor, DP (105 min, Cinema Guild). Copresented by The Believer.