A Cinema Guild Release a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor potx

TheCinemaGuild,Inc.
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Tel:(212)685‐6242,Fax:(212)685‐4717
www.cinemaguild.com
ACinemaGuildRelease
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a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
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101minutes/35mm/1.85/DolbyDigital5.1/InEnglish /NotRated
Stillsavailableat:www.cinemaguild.com/downloads
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NYPublicityContact:
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SusanNorgetFilmPromotion
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NewYork,NY10013
tel:212.431.0090
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www.norget.com


Sweetgrass _________________________________________________

Synopsis
AnunsentimentalelegytotheAmericanWest,Sweetgrassfollowsthelastmodern‐day
cowboystoleadtheirflocksofsheepupintoMontana’s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.
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AbouttheFilm
Sweetgrass premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. It has since played at the New
YorkFilmFestival,theRobertFlahertyFilmSeminar,andAFIFestival,amongothers.
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Recordist’sStatement
We began work on this film in the spring of 2001. Living at the time in Colorado, we
heard about a family of Norwegian‐American sheepherders in Montana, who were

amongthe lasttotrailtheirbandofsheeplongdistances—abouta  hundredandfifty
mileseachyear,allof it on hoof — upto the  mountainsfor summer pasture. I visited
themthatAprilduringlambing,andwassotake nwiththemagnitudeoftheirlife—at
once its allure and its arduousness — that we ended up working with them, their
friends,andtheirIrish‐Americanhiredhandsintensivelyoverthecomingyears.
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Sweetgrass is one of nine films to have emerged from the footage we have shot over
thelastdecade,theonlyoneintendedprincipallyfortheatricalexhibition.Astheyhave
beenshapedthroughediting,thefilmsseemtohavebecomeasmuchaboutthesheep
as about their herders. The humans and animals that populate them commingle and
crisscross in ways that have taken us by surprise. Sweetgrass depicts the twilight of a
defining chapter in the history of the American West, the dying world of Western
herders — descendants of Scandinavian and
northern European homesteaders — as
theystruggletomakealivinginaneraincreasinglyinimicaltotheirinterests.SetinBig
Skycountry,inalandscapeofremarkablescale andbeauty,thefilmportraysalifeworld
colored by an intense  propinquity between nature and culture — one that has been
integral to the fabric of human existence throughout history, but which is almost
unimaginablefortheurbanmassesoftoday.
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SpendingthesummershighintheRockymountains,amongtheherders,thesheep,and
theirpredators,wasatranscendentexperiencethatwillstay withmefortherestofmy
days.
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—LucienCastaing‐Taylor
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Sweetgrass _________________________________________________

Producer’sStatement:HowitstartedorTheLastSheepDrive
“Iamthelastguytodothisandsomeoneoughttomakeafilm aboutit.”Sospokeold‐
time rancher Lawrence Allested in 2001, aboutthe fact that hewas thelast person to
drive his sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka‐Beartooth mountain range on a grazing
permitthathad been handed down in his Norwegian‐Americanfamilyforgenerations.
FilmmakersandanthropologistslivingatthetimeinBoulder,Colorado,wehadwanted
tomakeafilmabouttheAmericanWest,andwereinstantlyintriguedbythetopic.
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We drove up to Big Timber that summer ready to make a film called “The Last Sheep
Drive.” Our cars were loaded to the brim with three camera rigs, a bunch of radio
microphones,ourtwokids,a  doganda babysitter.Forthefirstfewweekswe’dwake
upat4a.m.tohelpdrivethesheepthroughtownandthenup theroadstowardsthe
hills.Itwasafamily adventureforus, andafamilyenterprise fortheranchers—with
kids, grandparents, neighbors and passers‐by all helping.It soon became clear,
however,thatbecauseofthegrowinggrizzlybearandgreywolfpopulation,takingthe
kidsupintothemountainswould beimpossible.SoLucienwentupwithoutus,hiking
and riding, while I filmed other events in town—rodeos, dog trials, shooting contests,
haying,theSweetgrassCountyFair…
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WhenLuciengotdownfromthemountainsthatfall,hewasunrecognizable  –bearded
beyondbelief,20lbslighter,carryingatonoffootage,andlimping.Hewouldlater be
diagnosedwithtrauma‐inducedadvanceddegenerativearthritis,causedbycarryingthe
equipmentdayandnight,andneeddoublefootsurgery.Whenwestartedtowatchthe
footage,werealizedthatwehadtwo,ormore,differentfilms.(Andsomanydifferent
pointsofviewthatIthoughtaboutcallingthefilm“APieceoftheBigSky.”)Wedecided
themostcompellingstoryforatheatricalfilmwastheoriginalonewe’dbeeninterested
in:thesheepdriveitself—asritual,ashistory,aschallenge.Eventhen,wehadagood
200hoursoffootagetowadethrough.Littledidweknowthatthiswouldtakeusabout
eightyears.Inthemeantime,wewentbackuptofilmlambing,shearing,thefollowing
year’s sheep drive, and the one after  that.We even moved to the East Coast. (We

started
joking that we’d call the film, “The Penultimate Sheep Drive.”)  Most of the
footage, however is from that first summer. In 2006, the ranch was sold, along with
mostofthesheep.Nowthefilmisfinallyfinished.Asforatitle,we’dstartedusing“Big
Timber,” as it was the
 name of the town where the drive began, butas fittingas that
was for the title of a Western, it implied a film about logging.We finally settled on
“Sweetgrass.”Whilethejourneyistremendouslyhard,itisundertakennotjustforthe
literal goal of reaching (sweet) grass, but also to carry on tradition against all sorts of
odds.Thereisasilent1925documentary,calledGrass:ANation'sBattleforLife(1925)
1925byMerianC.Cooper,ErnestSchoedsack, andMargueriteHarrison,aboutanheroic
seasonal trek (transhumance) of herds and Bakhtiari herdsmen in Persia.Sweetgrass
tips its
 hat to that film, and is a tribute to past and contemporary people who still
managetoekeoutabittersweetlivingontheland.
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—IlisaBarbash
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________

Filmmakers’Biographies
BarbashandCastaing‐Taylor’sworkseekstoconjugatetheambiguityandprovocations
of art with a documentary attachment to the immediate flux of lived experience.
Workingin Montanasince2001, theyhavedeployeddifferentstylistic registersin film,
video, and photography to evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the
pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological Western landscapes with
multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound. Forthcoming works in 2010 include
HellRoaringCreek,CoomBiddy,Into‐the‐jug(geworfen),TurnedatthePass,Breakfast,
DaybreakontheBedGround,BeddingDown,andTheHighTrail.
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PreviousworksincludeMade

inUSA(1990),afilmaboutsweatshopsandchildlaborin
the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), an ethnographic
video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art
market, which won eight international awards. Their work hasbeen exhibited and the
subject
 of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum, and also
exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and the James Gallery at CUNY
GraduateCenter.
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Their written publications include Visualizing Theory (Taylor, ed., Routledge, 1994),
Cross‐CulturalFilmmaking(California,1997),TransculturalCinema,acollectionofessays
bytheethnographicfilmmakerDavidMacDougall(Taylored.,Princeton,1998),andThe
CinemaofRobertGardner(Berg,2008).TaylorwasthefoundingeditoroftheAmerican
AnthropologicalAssociation’sjournalVisualAnthropologyReview(1991–94).
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Ilisa Barbash is Associate  Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum,
Harvard University. Lucien  Castaing‐Taylor is the Director of the Sensory Ethnography
Lab,andformerDirectoroftheFilmStudyCenteratHarvardUniversity, wherehealso
teachesinVisual&EnvironmentalStudiesandinAnthropology.
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Sweetgrass _________________________________________________

Crew
ProducedbyIlisaBarbash
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RecordedbyLucienCastaing‐Taylor
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SoundEditingandMixby  ErnstKarel
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DigitalPost‐Productionby   PatrickLindenmaier
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FeaturingJohnAhern,ElaineAllestad,
LawrenceAllestad,PatConnolly 
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FundedinpartbygrantsfromtheLEFFoundation
andtheOshkoshAreaCommunityF oundation
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