"One of the best horror scenes this year arrives in a documentary about French pastoralism. It's pitch-black out on a Pyrenean mountainside. Wagnerian lightning illuminates the ridges and the rain sheeting down. Bells clank in darkness as the sheep flee en masse to the other side of the col. Yves, the shepherd in charge, faces down this bewilderment, trying to perceive the threat: Are those eyes?"
"Surveying the wind-ruffled pastures, lingering in battered cabins, it's a highly cinematic depiction of the conflict in the Pyrenees provoked by the reintroduction of the brown bear. Much past rural cinema made hay from insisting we beware of the locals: Deliverance's vicious hicks, The Wicker Man's wily pagans, Hot Fuzz's Barbour-jacketed cabal for the greater good. But the new school rides with the locals like Keegan's film taps their knowledge and tells us what they've known all along: that it's nature that's truly scary."
The Shepherd and the Bear captures a tense Pyrenean night as a shepherd confronts panicked sheep amid a suspected bear presence. The film exemplifies a new wave of European rural cinema that treats country life with sympathy and deference to local knowledge. These films frame conflicts arising from brown bear reintroduction, ruralists' resistance to culling bans, and challenges in finding successors for traditional roles. Contemporary examples include stories of windfarm disputes, agricultural displacement for solar panels, town-country divides, and the fading of traditional livelihoods, revealing broader tensions between conservation, modernization, and rural survival.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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