Using footage shot in Kyrgyzstan and Soviet archival footage and photography, this 10-minute film tells the story of sheep, starting from ancient times, when they grazed on the meadows of Central Asia, crossing, together with their nomadic masters, the snowy mountains in search of new pastures. Illustrated by J. S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 208 “Schafe können sicher weiden” (Sheep can safely graze), their existence is brutally interrupted by the arrival of new masters, coming “from beyond the mountains” to implement what can be called the beginnings of (Soviet) industrial (animal) farming. The film is narrated from the point of view of its heroes, whose responses are not only subtitled in English, German, Kyrgyz (or possibly any other language), but utterly human, like that sheep, calling desperately for her mother at the beginning of the film, and her brother or sister in fate, who is violently thrown on a truck in the middle of an animal market to be slaughtered, and looks at us with eyes saying simply : “I am a sheep, after all.”

By giving voice to these sheep, the film addresses some of the pressing questions of today: the loss of dignity by those who have been colonized, used, and oppressed by “new masters,” and, with the disappearance of the “good shepherd” to watch over us, the catastrophe that economic and industrial indefinite growth has brought to the world we all live in.

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