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

TheCinemaGuild,Inc. 115West30 th Street,Suite800 NewYork,NY10001‐4061 Tel:(212)685‐6242,Fax:(212)685‐4717 www.cinemaguild.com ACinemaGuildRelease    a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor         101minutes/35mm/1.85/DolbyDigital5.1/InEnglish /NotRated Stillsavailableat:www.cinemaguild.com/downloads       NYPublicityContact:  SusanNorgetFilmPromotion 198SixthAve.,Ste.1 NewYork,NY10013 tel:212.431.0090 fax:212.680.3181 susan@norget.com 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.   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.   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.  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.  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.  —LucienCastaing‐Taylor    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.  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…  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.  —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.  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.  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).  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.              Sweetgrass _________________________________________________ Crew ProducedbyIlisaBarbash  RecordedbyLucienCastaing‐Taylor  SoundEditingandMixby  ErnstKarel  DigitalPost‐Productionby   PatrickLindenmaier  FeaturingJohnAhern,ElaineAllestad, LawrenceAllestad,PatConnolly   FundedinpartbygrantsfromtheLEFFoundation andtheOshkoshAreaCommunityF oundation        . TheCinemaGuild,Inc. 115West30 th Street,Suite800 NewYork,NY10001‐4061 Tel:(212)685‐6242,Fax:(212)685‐4717 www.cinemaguild.com A CinemaGuildRelease    a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor         101minutes/35mm/1.85/DolbyDigital5.1/InEnglish /NotRated Stillsavailableat:www.cinemaguild.com/downloads       . still managetoekeout a bittersweetlivingontheland.  — Ilisa Barbash Sweetgrass _________________________________________________ Filmmakers’Biographies Barbash and Castaing‐Taylor’sworkseekstoconjugatetheambiguity and provocations of