Un pasteur by Louis Hanquet is a documentary that stole the attention and hearts of the viewers of the Trento Film Festival competition. The story of a lonely shepherd, his sheep and the wolf who has returned to threaten their daily life in the mountains of southern France. We met the director.
There are a wolf and some sheep, in a mountain pasture between the tops of mountains sculpted by time. It seems like the premise of a fairy tale, and in his way it is, but the protagonist is a shepherd, young and solitary, in love with his work, with animals and with nature. The documentary A pasteur It’s the best thing we’ve seen so far Trento Film Festival. It is a film about an ancestral dynamic, like that of the life and death of a flock of sheep, and at the same time very contemporary, like the fight against a predator that has long since disappeared from those mountains of southern France, the wolf, which has recently returned to threaten the daily lives of shepherds and breeders.
Félix is the shepherdhe is thirty years old and learned from his father Francis what does the migration of flocks towards lowland pastures mean (in winter), and vice versa face the climb towards the peaks in summer. Transhumance, mountain pastures, ancient terms made understandable and frontal, violent and hypnotically fascinating by the director Louis Hanquet, making his directorial debut after having worked in many areas of film production. We met him in Trento, where he competes for the Golden Gentian.
“I started from an investigation into the return of the wolf to France, which occurred in the region that I am describing very recently. I wanted to meet families of farmers and shepherds, to initially talk about the invisible damage caused by the predator, the anguish and depression of people who want to abandon a profession they have been doing for years. In France we have lost the habit of dealing with wolves. One day I met Félix (and his father Francis), it was a real love at first sight like the one a director can have for a character. He had something mysterious about him, I felt he could turn into a great movie character. But he didn’t want to be filmed, he was wary, he built a bubble for himself that he couldn’t easily enter. It took the militant commitment of the father, who looked favorably on the possibility of giving visibility to their trade union struggle and their very old-fashioned, artisanal way of working, and a long period of nine months spent together following him during the transhumance to bring him to trust, accepting to be taken back. They are among the few who still travel a lot with their animals, even 250 kilometers in ten days. We became very close in those days, he understood that I wasn’t with him just to shoot a few pictures and disappear, but that I also put my all into my work. He told me that I could then go with him to the mountain pastures during the summer. Only then did the shooting of the film begin.
I imagine he shot many hours of material
Filming lasted two years, during limited periods. I had about ninety hours of footage, which really isn’t a lot for this type of documentary. I didn’t go around much during the day, I spent a lot of time doing things with him, helping him. It was the way we worked, to also give him something in return. It’s not easy to resume in the mountains, there isn’t much electricity where he goes. Batteries had to be transported. We had the same limitations as when we shot film: when we ran out of batteries we couldn’t shoot anymore. We paid a lot of attention to when and what to shoot.
At times it seemed like a war film to me, but without the battles. With the flocks and an invisible enemy like the wolf, without a real explosion of violence, struggling with the preparation for the clash, and then the attempt to limit the damage after the predator’s attacks, with the sheep killed or seriously maimed.
I found Félix’s way of working shocking, especially compared to other farmers who see animals as a resource to be exploited. He regards every non-human living being as one hundred percent sensitive. He has a very strong emotional bond with his dogs, for example. This is what pushed me to shoot animals as well as human beings, capturing their expression, putting myself at their level. With animals he has a real exchange relationship, he communicates a lot with non-verbal language. He pushed me to ask myself a lot about the relationship with nature, as well as with animals.
What do you think of the wolf, it is part of nature, but for a long time it has not been native to those areas and now seems to have become a predatory enemy?
Today they are not native to France because they were savagely and criminally eradicated in the past. In France we burned forests, poisoned rivers and did terrible things to wipe out a species. It was considered a problem within a very productivist and capitalist vision of agriculture. We have completely destroyed wild animals, altering the French ecosystem in a very violent way. The return of the wolf today creates debate, I can’t say I’m for or against, I have a lot of empathy for the shepherds who suffer, and a lot of admiration for those who find a way to coexist, avoiding reacting only with the anger and claims of those who want to exterminate them again . There are many ways today to protect yourself from wolves, be it electric fences or guarding dogs. They are big and white and I show them in the film, they come from Italy, from Abruzzo. Even though it is a daily fear for Félix, at the same time he considers it a natural risk that one must know how to live with. It is true that it makes the job of shepherd or breeder more difficult, like the climate or the risk of diseases. I understand those who are very angry, they have the right to be, especially the older ones, who have lost the habit of protecting themselves and have to face an additional amount of work. Felix is in his early thirties and learned the trade when the wolf was already present. I think that in about ten or fifteen years the issue will be settled and coexistence possible.
Felix is a solitary shepherd, who has established exclusive and absolute contact with nature
Contemporary solitude is linked to living in solitude while living in big cities next to each other, he lives in a solitude made of essentiality, at the same time full of something other than human beings. He has a very strong bond with nature, which poses questions of life and death to him every day. Then there are his beloved animals, which he must take care of.
