A FILM BY ILISA BARBASH & LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR

“A really intimate, beautifully shot examination of the connection between man and beast…”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Achieves a hypnotic beauty all its own.” – New York magazine

“Impressive. Bracing. Majestic. We begin to glimpse the rhythm that has,
for more than a century, governed these hard, skillful, good-humored American lives.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“A film of subtle shifts and slowly dawning disclosures. If any faces emerge…
it’s those of the sheep, strikingly dryly humorous expressions.
Who would have thought it would take a formalist project
about sheep to burrow so deeply into the secret sorrows of the working class?”
– Andrew Schenker, Artforum online

“Might indeed be the very last Western… In preserving this special,
lost American tradition, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor have made
a lasting contribution to the canon and one of the year’s best nonfiction films.”
– Michael Tully, HammerToNail.com

“An extraordinary piece of visual anthropology that is
as beautiful and involving as it is informative about a threatened way of life.”
– Nora Lee Mandel, Film-Forward.com

“Gorgeous! The rhythms of the pasturing are as alluring as the rhythms of the film itself.”
– Howard Feinstein, Filmmaker Magazine

“A grand documentary Western. Astounding.” – Farihah Zaman, Reverse Shot

“Monumental. An anthropological work of art.” – Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope

A paean to the Old West: SWEETGRASS captures modern cowboys’ overland journey, wrangling thousands of sheep, as they move across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, amid sweepingly dramatic vistas and endless skies. Ronnie Scheib in Variety describes the film as “a mad cross between Howard Hawks’s RED RIVER” and an anthropological account of vanishing nomadic traditions, with “a dash of Tex Avery’s DRAG-ALONG DROOPY.” Twenty-first century cowboys call their mothers on cell phones and complain about rainy weather, ornery sheep and exhausted horses. A strikingly beautiful film, SWEETGRASS is at once funny, awe-inspiring and endearing. At first the passive, fuzzy sheep seem utterly adorable; over time we come to understand the exasperated cowboy who screams profanities at this sea of stubborn, bleating beasts over which he struggles to reign.

• Official SWEETGRASS web site
• Listen to our podcast:: Q & A with filmmaker Lucien Castaing-Taylor
  (Recorded January 8, 2010)

USA •  2009 • 101 MINS. • CINEMA GUILD

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