Notes from Sheepland

Arkadia

In a world where farming is mechanized and farm animals are fed with products coming from across the globe, a young shepherd is trying to keep his practice sustainable by using ancestral ways to raise his flock.

The Garden of Stones

1976 · ★ 6.5

Secrets and mysteries lose power when they are spread too widely. This is what the villagers discover when they invade an old man's vision-inspired shrine to the namelessly holy.

The Story of the Weeping Camel

2004 · ★ 7.1

When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.

Wolves Return

2019

Wolves divide and fascinate us. 150 years after they were driven to extinction in Central Europe, they are returning slowly but inexorably. Are they dangerous to humans? Is it possible to coexist? Using Switzerland as a point of departure, where wolves have returned in the very recent past, this documentary sheds light on the wolf situation in Austria, eastern Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and even Minnesota, where freely roaming packs of wolves are more common sight.

The Seasons

1975 · ★ 6.8

The last collaboration of Artavazd Peleshian and cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov is a film-essay about Armenia's shepherds, about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, scored to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Sonaggios

2025

In the Sardinian town of Tonara, where the ancient art of crafting cowbells teeters on the edge of extinction, a family battles to preserve their heritage, passing down skills to a new generation while grappling with personal struggles and the pull of modernity. English subtitles.

Nightshave

2024

A narrator recounts a story about his missing friend, the downfall of a sheep shearing gang and sightings of a hairy beast in 1980s rural New Zealand.

Brotherhood

2022 · ★ 6.3

Jabir, Usama and Uzeir are three young brothers in a Sunni family of shepherds. Since childhood, their father Ibrahim has rigidly trained them in the principles of the Quran and has filled their minds with stories of the Bosnian War.

Disappearing World: The basques of Santazi

1987

This film follows the lives over one year, shot during three intervals, of two Basque shepherding families who live in Santazi, a village in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. The film is the only Disappearing World film made in western Europe and it focuses on the continuity and change in the community. This film shows the rationality behind the choice the villagers are making.

Considering the Ends

2020 · ★ 7.7

In 2016, videos showing the slaughter conditions of farm animals shocked the public opinion, who quickly forgot about them. With complicit gaze, Elsa Maury films a young shepherd’s relationship of co-dependence with her flock of ewes, which she must learn to slaughter under the best possible conditions.

The Shepherds of Berneray

1981 · ★ 7

In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Over the course of 18 months they documented the everyday lives and struggles of the crofters they lived among, whom were even then a vanishing breed. The film is in English and Gaelic. This carefully observed documentary by filmmakers Jack Shae and Allen Moore is a poetic ethnographic film in the style of their mentor, Robert Gardner (“Dead Birds”). It follows the rhythm of life on a wind-swept island in the Outer Hebrides through the four seasons and in the filmmakers’ observation of the day-to-day struggles of a vanishing society we see the deep-time legacy of their kind. The film is in English and Gaelic.

The Shepherdess

“The shepherdess” is a short ethnographic film inspired by Joyce, an 80 year old woman who has spent her whole life farming in Eastern Ontario. While this film is largely centred on Joyce’s narrative about her life, it is also about Joyce’s flock of about 20 Suffolk ewes, the filmmaker, and the relationships between these actors.