The Shepherd and the Bear

Writer and Director: Max Keegan

The Shepherd and the Bear is an unshowy documentary, written, directed and produced by Max Keegan, filmed around the small town of Ariege in the French Pyrannees. There is no voice over, but the footage shot over a year shows an old pastoral way of life that is under threat. The focus is Yves, a lone shepherd in his sixties, who after sheep sheering, drives his flock up to lush mountain pastures, to live all summer in a basic cabin with his sheep dogs. But there is a new EU-French-Spanish ecological initiative to re-introduce brown bears to the region, the last native bear having been killed there in 2004.

Many of the locals don’t buy the state-endorsed vision of all living together in harmony with nature. The bears naturally prey on the farmers’ livestock. Yves is forced to install a make-shift electric fence and hunters are vociferous in their condemnation of the project. There’s a chilling scene when a angry crowd of them, their faces masked by balaclavas, gather at night to protest. They’ve heard the news that a hunter is facing prosecution for shooting a bear. He’d come across two bear cubs and tried to scare them off firing his rifle into the air. But in so doing, he has drawn the fury of the mother bear who attacks and mauls him. He survives, but only by shooting her dead.

The cinematography by Clement Beauvois is magnificent, catching the mountain pastures in all weathers. There are frequent storms, and the beginning of autumn is signalled by the descent of great enveloping mists. The large flock itself is caught as it flows like a river along mountain passes. The work of a shepherd looks easy until a new man, a singer in a small band, signs up to try it out one summer. Yves looks on disapprovingly as the fails to control the sheep dogs. It’s like watching a particularly inept substitute teacher: the dogs playing him up mercilessly. The flock end up the wrong way round, trying to go back the way they came. “You need to beat that dog,” growls Yves unsentimentally. Indeed the pragmatic attitude to life with animals is underlined when a vast, squealing boar pig is dragged by a bunch of farmers from a truck. If their motive isn’t immediately clear, it soon becomes so when we glimpse the see the pig’s hanging carcass, and the subsequent pork-based feast of the villagers.

And there’s a funny scene when two locals try to capture a runaway rooster who repeatedly outwits them, finally flying over a high yew hedge and out of their clutches.

Meanwhile we get glimpses of another young man, an only son, whose parents have to chivvy him about his school work. But he is passionate about wildlife: we see him in camouflage gear, photographing birds, getting his mother to help him learn their Latin names. Later there is a magical sequence when he captures on camera a she-bear and her cubs meandering through high pasture. It emerges that his ambition is to work for the local environmental police and, without overt signposting, the quiet tension in the film emerges through these focus on these two different approaches to what is ‘natural’.

And Yves’ way of life is threatened on a more prosaic level: he’ll soon be too old for its rigours. There’s a brief sequence where he’s brought home in an ambulance. There’s no overt explanation, but we hardly need one. Even a simple fall would be enough to force him to retire. Early scenes showed his daughter Lisa working with him, but at the end her cheerful local wedding: a new life beckons. The future of this mountainous region, it seems, lies in the hands of youngsters like the enthuastic young naturalist who takes delight in the reintroductdion of the brown bear.

It’s a beautiful, quietly eloquent film, its elegiac reflections delicately underlined Amine Bouhafa’s moving score.

The Shepherd and The Bear will be released in cinemas on 6th February 2026 courtesy of Conic.