2009 · observational · pastoral · sensory
Sweetgrass
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash1h 41m2009
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, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
Our read: Sweetgrass (2009) reads as a neutral, slow-burn, inventive observational · pastoral · sensory entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook.
Neutral, slow-burn, measured observational / pastoral, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured.
- slow-burn
Watching Sweetgrass tonight? Spin for your lens.
Everyone on the couch spins once and gets one craft to watch for. After the credits, compare what you caught.
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Everyone on the couch gets one craft to watch for. Spin the wheel to get yours. Sound on: the narrator reads your mission.
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How Sweetgrass feels to watch.
Each axis is scored by hand, not from votes or genre averages. The bar uses the film's own colours.
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a wordless, immersive elegy to the last sheepherders in Montana's mountains.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if slow, narration-free observational documentaries test your patience.
Eight films that feel like this one.
Closest in the twelve-axis space, not “people also liked”. All films like Sweetgrass, with why →
Discussion
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