sweetgrass

Sweetgrass

Year 2009
Runtime 101 mins
Language English
Alberta Premiere

PG - Advisory: Language May Offend

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. The colourful characters and beautiful mountain scenery will at once feel familiar to Albertans who are acquainted with “Big Sky Country” and the lives of “real” cowboys—individuals who are distinctly a breed apart from the ones usually seen on the big screen at a multiplex. The husband and wife team of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor spent 10 years filming the 150-mile trek into the mountains; of the nine films composed from hundreds of hours of footage shot, SWEETGRASS is the only one intended for theatrical exhibition.

Countries

United States
Director
Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Producer
Ilisa Barbash
Cinematographer
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Editor
Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Cast
John Ahern, Elaine Allestad,
Lawrence Allestad, Pat Connolly