Roundup
2020 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Nettie Wild
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Thousands of cattle come back from summer pasture to a shared corral used by twenty ranching families. Filmed from above and at ground level, the movement of the herd becomes a quiet study of cooperation, land, and the bond between people and livestock.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Wild could've made this a sentimental ranch poem, but instead she's built something structurally perverse—the aerial shots flatten the cattle into pure geometry, then ground-level frames snap you back into the animals' sensory world, collapsing the distance between observer and observed in ways that feel almost hostile to comfort.
The formal restraint here is exceptional: a three-minute essay that trusts montage and spatial perspective to articulate a genealogy of land stewardship without narration, positioning itself in the lineage of structuralist documentary while remaining entirely its own thing.
The decision to cut between those two vantage points—aerial abstraction and ground-level presence—is the whole film: it forces you to experience the herd as simultaneously a logistical system and a breathing collective, and that single formal choice makes the cooperation legible in a way conventional ranching footage never could.