“We had 3,000 sheep, which is tough because you cannot do a take twice. They wouldn’t do it. They’re very bad extras.”
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Sophie Deraspe’s extraordinary new film Bergers, Shepherds in English, stars Félix-Antoine Duval as a burned-out Montreal advertising executive who drops out of the rat race to become a shepherd in Provence. But the supporting cast in this stunning-shot French-language feature also includes thousands of sheep, a bunch of herding dogs, goats and one rather memorable donkey who is being reluctantly pulled along by a shepherd.
“For some scenes, the shepherd we’re walking with has a herd of 3,000 sheep,” said Deraspe, in an interview on a bench on Émery St., just outside the Quartier Latin Cinéma, where the film was screening Thursday afternoon as part of the Cinémania film festival. The film, which opens in cinemas Friday, won the award as best Canadian feature film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. It’s the second straight film of Deraspe’s to win that prestigious honour, following Antigone, which won the same prize at TIFF in 2019.
“I don’t think I’ll ever again film as many animals as I did for Bergers, with something like 3,000 sheep, a donkey, hens, goats and dogs, of course,” Deraspe said. “They need dogs. They wouldn’t be able to do that work without dogs.”
Some of the shepherds you see in the film are actually real shepherds she met in France while preparing the shoot and that was clearly quite useful in the scene that involved thousands of sheep wandering around. There are a couple of memorable scenes where the herd of sheep literally take over a village and stroll across a highway overpass.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without real people there who know how to manage a herd,” Deraspe said. “When they go into the village or across a highway, we had 3,000 sheep, which is tough because you cannot do a take twice. You can’t ask the flock to do the scene again. They wouldn’t do it. They’re very bad extras.”
Deraspe adapted the film from Mathyas Lefebure’s 2006 autobiographical novel D’où viens-tu, berger? The book was inspired by his decision to ditch his ad agency career in favouring of herding sheep in rural France. The film opens with Mathyas, also the name of the character in the film, in Arles, an ultra-picturesque town in Provence famous for its Roman ruins and in fact one of the first images we see is the remains of a Roman amphitheatre.
He pops into the local pub to meet with the town’s shepherds and though he’s almost laughed out of the room when he asks for a job, eventually one herder says he’ll give him a chance. But unsurprisingly this idealistic Montrealer soon realizes dreaming of herding sheep and actually doing it for real are two very different things.
After being quickly fired, he finds a more sympathetic sheep owner and soon enough he and some more experienced shepherds are heading to way high in the Alps with thousands of sheep in tow. Oh, and a government bureaucrat, Élise (Solène Rigot), is along for the ride, seduced by his poetic letters to her singing the praises of pastoral life.
It looks stunning, but not in a picture-postcard way.
“I wanted the scenery to be mingled with all of the elements, sky, water, earth, grass, with the animals and the two shepherds,” Deraspe said. “They need each other, they need the flock and they need this environment. Of course, they are beautiful images, but I wanted to film them in this environment. And they fall in love. But they fall in love in a quite organic way, not in a dramatic narrative way. Just like a sheep wouldn’t stand alone in the mountains. Anywhere we’d put the camera, it would be beautiful. So it was more about how the human beings and animals are interacting with this land.”
It was the production company micro_scope — the producer of the Oscar-nominated films Incendies and Monsieur Lazhar — that brought the novel to Deraspe and what she liked was the idea of a story of someone trying to find their place in the world.
“It’s painful, it’s also depressing at a certain point, when he realizes it won’t be easy,” Deraspe said. “And I knew it would be cinematic because of the setting. It’s also not just a journey across another continent. It’s a journey through time in a way because it’s a way of living that’s almost the same as it was thousands of years ago. And much of it is my take on the story, like starting in Arles in the south of France, which has this Roman Coliseum, to start in a place where humans have been building and herding for thousands of years.”
Bergers is in an entirely different universe than her previous film, Antigone, which was loosely inspired by the Greek tragedy of the same name and the shooting in Montreal of Fredy Villanueva, an 18-year-old who was shot dead by police in a park. Deraspe said she tends to make one film really rooted in nature and the next one grounded in the contemporary world. So she figures her next film will be more tied to life today as opposed to focusing on a job, herding sheep, that’s existed for thousands of years.
Bergers, under the title Shepherds, is playing with English sub-titles at the Cineplex Forum.