Scott MacDonald referenced Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s daring and important documentary project Sweetgrass during his visit to UnionDocs in December. The film premieres theatrically this week at Film Forum. The opening night is Wednesday, January 6th. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash will be holding Q&A’s following the 7:50 pm screenings on Friday and Saturday (1/8 & 1/9).
A paean to the waning world of 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. Wife and husband filmmakers / anthropologists Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor spent three summers high in the Rockies among the herders and their charges to chronicle this extraordinary 200-mile journey. 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 empathize with the exasperated cowboy who screams profanities at this sea of stubborn, bleating beasts over which he struggles to reign.
“A one-of-a-kind experience. At once epic-scale and earthbound, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s startling doc plays like a mad cross between Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER and an anthropological account of vanishing nomadic traditions, with a dash of Tex Avery’s DRAG-ALONG DROOPY.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety
“A really intimate, beautifully shot examination of the connection between man and beast…” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“Impressive, bracing, majestic… You enter a sort of trance. Only thus, perhaps, can we begin to glimpse the rhythm that has, for more than a century, governed these hard, skillful, good-humored American lives, and which has itself been cut short.” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
Posted in: UnionDocs News.
