Yves Raspo may be the angriest man in Europe.
The shepherd, who herds cattle in a very remote area of the French Pyrenees, communicates mostly in guttural terms that don’t seem to express a positive view of things. Lately, Raspo has had a lot to talk about – specifically, a mandate from power centers far from the Pyrenees, which ordered the reintroduction of bears into the wild in the area where the shepherd lives. Unsurprisingly, the bears, transported from Eastern Europe, show a strong appetite for his delicious sheep.
Rasbud’s story and the larger questions raised by the rewilding project are told in the documentary Shepherd and beardirected by Max Keegan and produced by Keegan, Elizabeth Woodward, Jesse Moss, Amanda McBain, and co-produced by Eleonore Voisard. The film will have its international premiere at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), following its world premiere in September at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine.
“We met Yves and kind of fell in love with him,” Keegan explained during a Q&A session in Camden, which we attended. “He was very welcoming and quirky, but also kind of intimidating. And I thought: “That sounds good.”
Keegan approached this subject having grown up in the British countryside, an area “that was already sterile by the time I was born,” he wrote, “quaint farmers’ cottages for retirees, Londoners on vacation, second homes for bankers. It’s more of a postcard than an actual place. Raspaud’s Pyrenees have undergone a similar process of displacement and extermination; young people born there have moved to the cities, in many cases, and Raspaud struggles to find someone to continue his solitary work when he is ready to suspend his staff.
In the Q&A session, the director said he first heard about the rewilding effort from a pig farmer with experience living in the Pyrenees, who told him that a fierce struggle had pitted local herders against the conservationists and government officials responsible for making the plan work. Keegan recalls: “He told me about the bears, and I couldn’t really get it out of my head,” he recalls. “There were people shooting at cops and burning police cars. Some really extreme things happened.
Keegan continued: “It felt like a strange conflict because both sides were really, really right.” “I really felt like I could empathize with the farmers in the area who feel that this decision was made by people who live far away from them and don’t understand their lives. But I also really empathize with the people who are interested in the bear as a symbol and want to protect this type of animal. Because if this doesn’t work here in the middle of rural France, where almost no one lives, with all the money that’s been put into this program, it’s a very painful situation for conservation efforts more broadly.
For Keegan, there was only one obstacle in shooting a documentary in that part of the world: “I couldn’t speak French.”
He now speaks it proficiently, but before reaching this level, he discovered the paradoxical benefit of a less-than-stellar command of the language when he met locals in the mountains.
“My French wasn’t great at first, and so I think it was very frustrating for the characters because I was kind of a moron,” he said. “So, they didn’t have much to worry about like, ‘Who is this guy? What are his intentions here?
In addition to Yves, the director will eventually focus much of his attention on a teenager named Cyril Piquet. Although Cyril is the son of a farmer, he felt a kind of kinship with the bear creatures and wanted to join the wildlife police “tasked with preventing shepherds from shooting bears.” Keegan and the film team met Cyril and his family while searching for potential participants for the documentary.
Keegan recalls: “We were really blown away by this kid,” Keegan recalls. “There’s a huge cliff heading into the mountain, and he was packing his bags. I’m like, “Where are you going?” and he said: I’m going up there. We’re like, why?’ And he’s like: ‘Because the woodpeckers are there, I really want to see them. So, I’m going for the weekend. See you later, bye. And we’re like, uh, sounds interesting. And so, we continued to spend time with him, and I was really struck by his love of nature and his very special relationship with the mountain.
The movie presents opposing viewpoints – anti-bear and pro-bear – without attempting to resolve them. Keegan admitted: “I don’t know my politics on this,” he said. “I really admire everyone I know in the Pyrenees, and I don’t want to hang my hat on either side of this debate.”
What it is be against is to turn the region’s population into blatant stereotypes.
“I felt from the beginning that what [reporting] was there [on the re-wilding issue] “-and not much-has been done by journalists who have done a really hasty job and who have characterized the people who live in the area as kind of rural people who don’t have a lot of knowledge,” he said. “I wanted to make something that respects them and shows not only that they are right, but that these are people who live a beautiful life in harmony with the mountain.”
Although Yves is not a proponent of putting bears back on their neck of the woods, he lives in a way that many conservationists might admire.
“He never leaves the valley. He often says: ‘I don’t eat anyone I don’t know. He brings all those animals into the world and brings them out again,” Keegan noted. “He’s living an incredibly environmentally respectful life and passing it on to humans [farming]It’s a process of pushing the sheep up the mountain every summer to graze the open areas, there are no artificial inputs at all, and the actual amount of meat production is minimal. So, it seemed really strange for the environmental lobby to go after these people who live a much healthier life than a lot of these people who live in Toulouse and Paris and are part of a larger type of food system.
Shepherd and bear Shows four more times at IDFA: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Submarine Entertainment is handling global sales of the film. Indox handles international festival rights.
“We truly believe this is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen. It takes you to a place that very few people have experienced or seen,” said producer Elizabeth Woodward, CEO of production and distribution company WILLA Films. “Max will be on a festival tour to share the film with audiences around the world, and then we hope to find a great distribution partner who can help us bring this film to audiences in theaters and then on streaming platforms.”