POV’s 24th season continues with the U.S. broadcast premiere of Sweetgrass on Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Check your local listings.
Sweetgrass is a true-life western with the last of modern-day cowboys leading their flock of sheep into the breathtaking and often dangerous Montana mountains for summer pasture. Filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor present a riveting and poetic portrait of the American West just as one of its traditional ways of life dies out.
The film experience continues at POV’s Sweetgrass companion website:
- Join a live chat with filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Elaine Allestad from the Allestad Ranch on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 2 PM ET.
- Watch the film before its broadcast on your iPhone or iPad with the PBS mobile app, or watch it on POV’s website starting Wednesday, July 6, 2011.
- Find out fun facts about sheep. Each fact is tweetable so you can share them with your friends.
- Watch selected video clips with a commentary track from Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, then go behind the lens with an exclusive extended interview with the filmmakers.
- Learn about the 10 directors who inspired Sweetgrass filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s unique vision and watch video clips from the influential films.
- Explore an interactive map of the sheep herding route and summer pasture areas from Sweetgrass in Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.
- Dig in to the world of ethnographic filmmaking with critic Robert Koehler’s “Sweetgrass and the Future of Nonfiction Cinema,” an excerpt from Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s landmark essay “Iconophobia: How Anthropology Lost It at The Movies” and “The Filmmakers in Montanta,” a newspaper article about the production of Sweetgrass from Montana’s Big Timber Pioneer.
- Share your stories of a way of life that’s changing in your community.
Visit POV’s Sweetgrass companion site for more interactive features and a giveaway for Sweetgrass prizes.
POV’s 24th season continues on PBS Tuesday nights through September 27, concluding with a special broadcast on November 10. Keep up with the films at http://pbs.org/pov, on Twitter @povdocs or on Facebook.