PortoPostDoc

Sweetgrass

Erva-doce · Sweetgrass

Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor

2009, USA, 101', M12


Focus Sensory Ethnography Lab 2016

01 Dec 2016 · TM Rivoli, Pequeno Auditório · 16H30


Buy your ticket at Bilheteira Online.

Sweetgrass was, together with Demolition (J.P. Sniadecki, 2008), the film that gave the international knowledge of the Sensory Ethnography Lab's work. Between 2001 and 2003, Lucien Castaing-Taylor e Ilisa Barbash documented the life of a family of shepherds that still led their flocks to summer pastures on the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, the same field where the fiction Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) was filmed, between Montana and Wyoming. The documentary still conserves classical ethnographic elements: the characters, the narration - the own journey - and it shows significative moments of the shepherds’ life. The real interest, however, is in the camera and sound work, that plays continuously with different scales: the filmmakers combine close ups and wide shots, putting the cameras inside the flock or at kilometers of distance, to obtain effects of immersion or detachment. The result is a refreshing breeze on the ethnographic cinema that crosses empathy with abstraction. (Iván Villarmea)