2010 - SWEETGRASS, documentary about sheep is really a western

Sheep ranchers in Montana move their herd into a national park for grazing.  Filmed mostly during 2001 without any narration.

In some ways a modern western epic.  We see these sheep ranchers on horses and carrying cell phones instead of six shooters, rounding up and moving their sheep up into an area of a Montana national park and it looks like a hell of a lot of work.

I 've spend some time around sheep and I can say on sworn testimony,  sheep are some of the dumbest, noisiest creatures ever put on the planet.  To get them all to go in any direction much less the same direction is a modern miracle and a tribute to these cowboys.

The Montana scenery is very nice.  There are some beautiful long shots of these stupid sheep heading down mountain passages which are quite spectacular to watch.  One scene has a magnificent pan around a beautiful vista of mountains while on the soundtrack a cowboy can be heard on his cell phone complaining to his mother about how awful the work is and how it's destroying his body and spirit.  The cowboy speaks in shall we say fluent foul language. 

No silly Brokeback Mountain nonsense here as if anyone would have had time for that.  Just a film about some cowboys doing some real hard work. 

101 minutes