Woolly
Rebekka Nystabakk, Norway, 2024o
The sheep farm owned by the Norwegian Nystabakk family is being passed on to the fourth generation, to their daughter Rakel and her partner. They are leaving behind their work in the urban cultural sector to take on this new life task. Rakel's sister follows this process with her camera over a period of two years, allowing us to witness how the two women tackle daily challenges with humour and confidence.
In this tranquil documentary, Norwegian first-time director Rebekka Nystabakk observes how her sister and her partner take over the sheep farm of their parents. Over the course of more than a year, we accompany them as the sheep are bred and give birth, the new lambs grow up on wild pastures, are gathered again in the autumn and are either slaughtered or simply shorn, until the cycle begins anew. Above all, however, we witness how the two young women and their parents care for the animals throughout the year—how much they learn in the process, how often they have to swallow hard, and how they stay on course thanks to their down-to-earth humor and natural sense of solidarity. So, after the French-Canadian shepherd film Bergers, another rural idyll? No more so than that film was. Woolly neither ideologizes nor romanticizes. Precisely for that reason, the film works as a credible corrective to the hectic pace of urban life and to the casual exploitation of nature in our time.
Andreas Furler