I give up everything and I do the shepherd. When the mountains do not smile and the goats don’t do bye

« Enough, I leave the city and go to live on the Alps, raising goats. » Who knows how many have thought of it. But between saying and doing there is always the middle … the mountain. With its roughness, its difficulties, its contradictions. Because unlike how we learned with Heidi, The mountains do not always smile and the goats make you bye. There mountain lived and the idealized mountain They are not two sides of the same medal, they are two worlds. Which not always and not necessarily have meeting points.

It realizes on your skin Mathyas Lefebureaka Mathieu Lefebvre, Canadian writer who in the novel D’Où Viens you, Berger? (Where do you come from, shepherd?) Tell the autobiographical experience of a young marketing professional who, tired of the city’s life in Montreal, decides to leave his job to rediscover the bond with the land going to lead flocks in Provence. Or, at least, trying with the dream sooner or later to write to us on a book. A story that Sophie Deraspeoriginal director of Quebec, he also wanted to bring to the big screen. The film, Up to the mountains (Shepherd/Bergers in the original version), it comes out in theaters on Thursday 29 May and has as protagonists Félix-Antoine Duval And Solène Rigot. And then there is the main protagonist, not mentioned in the cast in the poster: the mountainin fact, which bursts into the Italian title of the film and which in it proves in all its complexity.

Becoming conductors of flocks is not easy. Especially if it is a folding choice, to escape the burnout of the metropolitan routine. There are those who have been doing it for generations and are not always happy to do it. The life of the shepherd is far from idyllic. Nothing to do with the scenes of sweet moments of relaxation on the course of a stream represented in many paintings and tapestries. The cattle must be treated, lead it during the transhumanceavoid losing even one garment during the journey. Which can be truly complex, in the crossings of the inhabited centers. Or impervious, in brushing towards the mountain pastures between burner and rocky spurs. But also dangerous, during thunderstorms or for the attack of wildlife. The shepherd does not know the convenience of a bed, he sleeps with animals, to the flood or in the huts and in the shelters that for centuries have dotted the streets of the progressive transfers from the bottom of the green clearings close to the peaks. Long days, so much effort, in the legs and in the head.

The protagonist of the story – who on his journey is joined by Elise, a municipal employee who is fascinated by the project of that Canadian visionary catapulted in the south of France and in turn decides to give up everything to devote himself to rural life -, experiences all these difficulties. Collides with the no of those who do not trust of a sbarbatello to the first experience that would end only by slowing down the work. Undergoes the bad to live of poor derelitti who have not chosen the shepherd and who have passed from one shack for a lifetime to another and have no other outburst except wine e violence against animals who are their existence but also their condemnation. Supports the Attempt to raise your head Of those who still believe and participate in events against the bureaucrats of cities accused of damaging the agricultural world and food sovereignty. He faces the fake courtesy of an « enlightened » breeder, who first encourages enthusiasm (« what is needed is above all passion ») and enhances life in nature but then goes on all furies When nature itself presents the account in the form of an attack of wolves.

Fiction and reality often cross. The theme of wolves for example. It is at the center of the debate of these months, with the European Union that is completing the process that will bring to downgrading of his protection. In the film the comparison between those who think that the fake news is true that the predators would have been reintroduced by well -paid officials And who, instead, recognizes that their return is the result of other dynamics and that both in their nature, hunt prey. Just as the climate change That « dries the springs and causes the July herbs to grew already in June as if we were in other latitudes ».

News, reality. And also a lot of poetry. Entrusted to photography, long fields that they let nature express in all its potentialto the rocky peaks that frame the horizon. Also for the viewer the film is a sort of transhumance which starts from the sea and goes more and more. Up to the mountains.