4 reasons to go see this film at the cinema
“Shepherds”: What does this film tell?
A Canadian advertiser one day decides to change existence and become a shepherd in Provence. How will he learn to live with elements, animals and men in a culture that is not his?
In Shepherds, Quebec director Sophie Deraspe is inspired by the experience that Mathyas Lefebure had told in Where do you come from, shepherd? To make a touching and authentic film. “Nomadism does not exist in Canada,” she explains. It is delightful to see that in France this millennial tradition coexists with modern life. Far from fantasies, how to film the rudeness, sometimes violence, of pastoral activity as accurately?
1. An unhappy vision of shepherd’s life
Far from the romantic representation that surrounds the figure of the shepherd, the film offers an immersion in the daily life of the mountains, where the harsh rubs shoulders with beauty. In search of proximity to nature, the hero accepts difficult living conditions.
An aspiration for the count that also guided the French Joseph Boussion in the same path. “We, shepherds, constantly hold on the border between the wild world and urban life,” confirms the one who publishes Shepherd. Existence without refuge (Ed. Grasset, 224 p .; € 19) and holds his “shepherd book” on Facebook. “Being a shepherd today represents a strong choice of life which questions an idealized vision of the place of man in nature. If more than 50,000 people follow my Facebook page, it is because this way of living challenges them.
The filmmaker Sophie Deraspe carries this desire for radicality on the screen, in the sense of return to the root. »»
2. Wolves: an omnipresent presence
In Provence or elsewhere, shepherds and their herds must today compose with the presence of wolves. During the thirteen years that the preparation of her film asked her, Sophie Deraspe saw this threat growing, and the predators approach more and more close to her location.
Until this night, in 2023, where the wolf went on the attack, killing several sheep. “In the early morning, we helped collect the bodies of dead animals. A very painful moment for the shepherd and for our team, ”she says.
In Shepherds, As often in life, the wolf remains invisible but makes palpable tension hover. This often scary presence is also at the heart of Living with wolves (2024), the last part of the documentary trilogy that Jean-Michel Bertrand devotes to this animal, far from the Manichean simplifications.
3. A powerful reflection on the challenges of a profession
“Human violence towards the sheep in my film is the consequence of a system in which breeders and shepherds are taken in vice,” analyzes Sophie Deraspe. Low income, precariousness, lack of recognition of their environmental and social role: all this ends up turning against animals in Shepherds.
But also against men in an Irish thriller featuring sheep farmers, which was released at the end of April, The beast clan. “The violence of wild life is less frightening than that born from the frustration of men and their feeling of abandonment,” comments Joseph Boussion.
4. A unique shoot to the rhythm of the herd
On the set of a fiction, everything is anticipated, because every minute is expensive. But here, to approach as closely as possible the reality of pastoral life marked by the climatic vagaries and the rhythm of the herd, Sophie Deraspe chose to soften the very strict rules and to assume the unexpected.
“We have experienced a form of availability in the living cycle. One day, for example, while we were walking with goats, dogs and three thousand sheep, one of them gave birth. We immediately released our cameras to capture the birth that appears in the film. »»
With these sometimes raw and always authentic images, the director reaches her goal: that by leaving the cinema room, spectators want to protect the living.
