Sheep are starring in some of the best, most mesmerizing documentaries of the year. They bleated their way through “Sweetgrass” and now they romp in “Sleep Furiously.”
But this new film, about a small town in Wales, is also about more than sheep and livestock. It captures, in a gentle and beautiful way, the peculiar feeling of weather, language and social interaction in this small green corner of the British Isles.
The filmmaker, Gideon Koppel, grew up in this part of Wales (his German parents had settled there in flight from the Nazi regime, a detail that is not mentioned in the picture). With an insider’s view of things, he browses across farm fields, cozy living rooms and barns.
Threading through the film, which is completely plotless, is the local library van, which stops off for its regular visits along these rural roads. These seem as much about a nice opportunity to chat as they are about the delivery of books.
The overall mood is that of a life fading away; the small-town schoolhouse is due to close and the old customs are just hanging in there. Yet Koppel also shows us the way technology works with old-fashioned farming, when he shows the processes by which tractors gather and wrap their loads of hay.
Some local characters become regular faces in the film, chief among them the filmmaker’s mother. At one point, she brings in a stuffed owl to a carpenter; seems the taxidermist did his job well, but the wooden stand for the bird is too tall. This potential Monty Python sketch simply plays out as a bit of everyday life, which is why it’s so charming.
Documentaries tend to have a specific goal in mind, or to use a narrator and talking heads and charts and graphs. None of that is on display in “Sleep Furiously.” This is a portrait, built of little moments.
We watch the wind blow through the trees, hear a man offer an ode to a roadway signpost, and see a teacher and his pupils play out a folk song in the school courtyard, a song that could easily be 300 years old.
Of course there’s the obligatory calf-birthing scene, without which no rural documentary would be complete (the pigs are also very active in this film). And there’s a great dog that watches a truck trundle away down a long, long country road, rapt in attention. “Sleep Furiously” takes time for things like that and forces you to re-adjust your clock accordingly.
“Sleep Furiously”
A gentle, nonnarrative documentary about a small Welsh town, consisting of short scenes of weather, livestock and social interaction, much of which takes place around the traveling library van. We see the place from the inside, from contemplative farming practices to dialogue with a Monty Python tilt.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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