In a typical summer filled with high-cost blockbuster productions, the documentary “Sweetgrass” was a welcome break from the normalcy of film. Described by the Washington Post as “part documentary, part western and part anthropological study,” it is the un-narrated story of Montana sheepherders who take their herd up the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for summer grazing — the last Montana ranchers took their sheep through the Absaroka-Beartooth Pass on a federal grazing permit in 2005, signifying the waning of a traditional way of life. After eight years of filming and development (begun in 2001), it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009.

Although some critics complained of the long scenes of the Montana landscape (The New Yorker commented that the directors “hold the camera on a ruminating beast, or a noisy shearing, dare you to get bored, wait for you to grow hypnotized, and then, just as you enter a sort of trance, abruptly cut”), media were generally positive on the film’s “classic observational documentary style” and “breathtaking panoramas.”

At the end of the showing, I couldn’t help comparing it to the 2005 (non-documentary) Ang Lee film “Brokeback Mountain,” which focused more on the relationship between the main characters Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist than the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Clearly, the stars of Brokeback are its characters and their lives, while those of Sweetgrass are the sheep and the Montana landscape — two completely different genres of film and two unique takes on the dying sheepherding lifestyle out West. (One thing to note is that Brokeback is set from 1964-1983, while Sweetgrass was filmed in the 21st century — still, the process of summering sheep up in the mountains looks remarkably unchanged).

Right Place
By Kosai Sekine