Saturday, March 12, 2011

There is some real gems on Netflix, particularly with respect to films that have a nomadic-pastoralist theme.

Today I watched Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, which was a documentary filmed in 1924 on the journey of a village of nomadic herdsmen in Iran to more productive rangelands. The (silent) narration is kind of funny, too.

Sweetgrass touched a little closer to home as it reflects something approximating the type of work that I do. This movie presents the modern day equivalent to the transhumant grazing system presented in Grass. Ignore the comments on this movie in Netflix, they are either completely wrong or completely out of touch. Sweetgrass is not appropriate for children beyond the first 15 to 20 minutes.

Even Miss Potter (the biography of Beatrix Potter) had a working landscapes conservation message at the end.

Philip

1 comment:

Paul said...

Grass good narration. Sweetgrass was missing the goat-skin rafts.