The shepherds, a tradition. Pastores, una tradición
2017 · 24m · España
Directed by Ignacio Ortega
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a globalised world, shepherd life approaches an end after lasting through centuries. The portrait asks whether an enduring trade faces extinction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's too respectful, too much of a straight elegy—the film genuinely believes in the nobility of its subject instead of interrogating why we're supposed to mourn this tradition, which would've been the actually interesting film.
Ortega situates himself in the lineage of anthropological portraiture and the essay documentary, executing with formal restraint and a sense of temporal weight that positions the shepherd's trade within a larger historical argument about cultural continuity and loss.
The decision to let silence and landscape breathing room do the elegiac work—cutting away from the shepherds themselves to hold on empty pasture and weathered tools—is what transforms what could've been nostalgic into something actually elegiac and strange.