Sweetgrass
From the plains of Montana to the vast expanses of Ethiopia, from the hills of Provence to the mountains of Kurdistan, from the depths of Iceland to the Australian Outback… This program takes us on a journey across continents, guided by a common thread: sheep. These animals become our entry point into communities and traditions, revealing both social and intimate upheavals, and crystallizing the relationships between human or between species.
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.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Lucien Castaing-Taylor is a British anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography. Since 2002, he has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His works include In and Out of Africa, which he made with Ilisa Barbash in 1992. It is an ethnographic video about issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards. His film Sweetgrass (2009), also made with Barbash, is an unsentimental elegy to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between humans and animals. In 2012, with Véréna Paravel, he directed an experimental film about industrial fishing in North America, Leviathan, which also won several awards.
