Sweetgrass March 12, 2010

Showtimes (valid 3/12-3/18) Fri-Thu 2:20, 4:50, 7:15, 9:40
ILISA BARBASH IN PERSON AT THE FOLLOWING SHOWTIMES
Sun, March 14 at, 4:50 & 7:15 shows (following 4:50 show will be informal “meet-and-greet”with Ilisa Barbash in Lot 68 lounge.)

The movie begins in the summer of 2003; a group of shepherds took a herd of sheep one final time through the mountains of the Northwest United States. It was a journey of almost 300 kilometers through expansive green valleys, by fields of snow, and across hazardous, narrow ridges—a journey brimming with challenges. SWEETGRASS, a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, follows these last sheepherders to trail their flocks up into Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture. Without commentary, this astonishingly beautiful film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, climate and landscape, and vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
http://www.sweetgrassthemovie.com/

ILISA BARBASH – Barbash’s work, collaborating with Castaing-Taylor, seeks to conjugate the ambiguity and provocations of art with a documentary attachment to the immediate flux of lived experience. Previous works includ 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. This work has been exhibited and the subject of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum, and also installed at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and the James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor divide their time between Massachusetts, USA, and the French Pyrenees. Barbash is a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.

“[A] wonderful documentary... The first essential movie of this young year… Astonishingly beautiful… A graceful and often moving meditation on a disappearing way of life… magnificent.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A one-of-a-kind experience.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety

“A spectacular documentary. Amazing images that will stick with you for a lifetime.” – Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

“Impressive. Bracing. Majestic.” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“Achieves a hypnotic beauty all its own.” – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
“Unforgettable. Fascinating.” – Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice

“Monumental. An anthropological work of art.” – Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope

“A grand documentary Western.” – Farihah Zaman, Reverse Shot

The film’s running time is 101 minutes; it is not rated.

Official Website: http://sweetgrassthemovie.com/