Sweetgrass (2009)

Unsentimental 21st-century documentary about the dying practice of sheep-ranging. Insanely grim start focusing on the workaday brutality of the industrial farm… imagine being born and your first experience is being tossed around the room by some asshole who sees you as a fleece jacket and lamb chops that haven't reached retail maturity yet. What this culture does to people in the name of progress got me feeling like Diogenes pointing at an abattoir meatgrinder and saying “behold, a man!” After this nightmare prelude, we wake into the world of the last cowboys. There's a romance to it, yes, dust and embers and twilight—and there's romance-annihilating tedium and frustration and loathing. They fiddle with flints and complain on the phone and spew curses at sheep who don't give a damn. Ground down and shattered by their work; reduced to living-dead economic functions; dots on the mountainside cursed with just enough self-awareness to suffer.