Yves Raspaud may be the grumpiest man in Europe.
The shepherd, who tends flocks in a very remote section of the French Pyrénees, mostly communicates in guttural utterances which do not seem to express a favorable view of things. Of late, Raspaud has had a lot to rasp about – namely, a mandate from centers of power far from the Pyrénees who have ordered the re-wilding of bears in the region where the shepherd lives. Not surprisingly, the bears, relocated from Eastern Europe, have demonstrated a robust appetite for his delectable sheep.
The story of Raspaud, and the larger questions raised by the rewilding project, is told in the documentary The Shepherd and the Bear, directed by Max Keegan and produced by Keegan, Elizabeth Woodward, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, and co-produced by Eleonore Voisard. The film is holding its international premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), following a world premiere in September at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine.
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“We met Yves and we kind of just fell in love with him,” Keegan explained during a Q&A in Camden, which we attended. “He was so surly and bizarrely welcoming, but also kind of petrifying as well. And I thought, ‘That sounds good.’”
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Keegan approached the topic having grown up in the British countryside, an area “that was already sterile by the time I was born,” as he has written, “quaint farmers’ cottages for retirees, holidaying Londoners, and second homes for bankers. More of a postcard than an actual place.” The Pyrénees of Raspaud have undergone a similar depopulation and deracination; young people born there have moved to cities, in many cases, and Raspaud struggles to find someone to carry on his solitary work for when he’s ready to hang up his staff.
At the Q&A, the filmmaker said he first heard about the rewilding effort from a pig farmer with experience living in the Pyrénees region who told him intense conflict had erupted pitting local shepherds against conservationists and government officials responsible for making the plan work. “He told me about the bears, and I just couldn’t really get it out of my head,” Keegan recalled. “There’ve been people who’ve shot at the cops and burned police cars. And there’s some really, really extreme stuff that’s happened.”
“It just seemed like such a weird conflict because both sides were really right,” Keegan continued. “I really felt like I could sympathize with farmers in the area who feel like this is a decision that’s been taken by people who live so far away from them and who don’t understand their lives. But I also really sympathize with the people who are interested in the bear as a symbol and want to protect these sorts of animals. Because if this can’t work here in the middle of really rural France where almost nobody lives, with all of the money that’s been put into this program, that’s a pretty damning state of affairs for wider conservation efforts.”
For Keegan, there was only one hitch with shooting a documentary in that part of the world: “I couldn’t speak any French.”
He now speaks it proficiently, but before he reached that level, he discovered a paradoxical benefit to possessing a less than a stellar command of the language as he met locals in the mountains.
“My French wasn’t great at the beginning, and so I think it was quite disarming for the characters because I was kind of a moron,” he said. “So, they didn’t have much to worry about like, ‘Who’s this guy? What are his intentions being here?’”
In addition to Yves, the director would eventually focus much of his attention on a teenager named Cyril Piquet. Although a farmer’s son, Cyril felt a sort of kinship with the ursine creatures and wanted to join the wildlife police “tasked with preventing shepherds from shooting the bears.” Keegan and the film team met Cyril and his family while searching for potential participants for the documentary.
“We were really struck by this kid,” Keegan recalled. “There’s this huge cliff face going up to the mountain, and he was packing his bags. I’m like, where are you going? He said, ‘I’m going up there.’ We were like, why? He’s like, ‘Because a woodpecker is up there I really want to see. So, I’m going to spend the weekend. See you later, bye.’ And we were like, ah, he seems interesting. And, so, we just kept spending time with him and I was really bowled over by his love of nature and his own quite special relationship to the mountain.”
The film presents opposing viewpoints – anti-bear and pro-bear – without trying to resolve them. “I don’t know about my politics around this,” Keegan acknowledged. “I am really fond of everyone that I know in the Pyrénees, and I wouldn’t want to hang my hat on either side of that debate.”
What he is against is reducing inhabitants of the area to gross stereotypes.
“I kind of felt from the outset that what [reporting] did exist [on the re-wilding issue] — and there’s not very much — had been done by journalists who’d done a really slapdash job and who characterized the people who live in the region as sort of rural hicks without much idea,” he said. “And I wanted to make something that was respectful to them and that said not just that they’ve got a point, but these are people who live such a beautiful life in such harmony with the mountain.”
Yves, though not a proponent of rewilding the bears to his neck of the woods, lives in a fashion 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 out again,” Keegan noted. “He lives an incredibly environmentally respectful life and transhumance [farming], which is this process of driving the sheep up the mountain every summer to graze open ranges, there are no industrial inputs whatsoever, and the actual amount of meat production is tiny. So, it seemed really weird that the ecological lobby would be after these guys who live much more sound lives than a lot of these guys who live in Toulouse and Paris and are a bigger part of a larger sort of food system.”
The Shepherd and the Bear screens four more times at IDFA: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Submarine Entertainment is handling worldwide sales of the film. Indox is handling international festival rights.
“We really believe that this is a movie that should be seen on a big screen. It brings you to a place that very few people have experienced and seen,” said producer Elizabeth Woodward, CEO of production and distribution company WILLA Films. “Max will be on a festival tour sharing the movie with audiences around the world, and then hopefully we’ll find a great distribution partner who can help us bring this movie to audiences in cinemas and then onto streaming platforms.”