Christian Cordova Aliaga, a shepherd from Peru, spends his days trailing and tending a flock of about 150 goats in California’s East Bay. Employed by Goats R Us, an area ranch, he strikes the animals each few days to overgrown meadows, grasslands, and forests close to houses, faculties, and different buildings which might be weak to wildfire.
Focused grazing is a practice that goes again centuries, and Aliaga — whose earnings assist his spouse and three youngsters in Peru — discovered at a younger age the right way to look after animals from his mother and father and grandparents. “This was handed down by way of generations,” he says. Not like thinning with equipment, Aliaga’s goats don’t spill oil, spark fires, or disturb the soil. “That is extra pure,” he says, “and on the identical time they’re fertilizing the land.” The goats are notably eager to eat the leaves of poison oak and French broom, that are troublesome to take away by hand.
Filmmaker Matthew Boyd adopted Aliaga, who works alone besides for 2 border collies, through the dry summer time grazing seasons between 2020 and 2022. What did Boyd hope his viewers would take away from his lyrical, contemplative movie? “I needed to offer viewers a glimpse into an easier, old-world way of life — in nature, alone with the animals.” And with hearth season beginning ever earlier within the West, he added, it was necessary for him to display “environmentally sound strategies of mitigating wildfires in a land so persistently devastated by them.”
Concerning the Filmmaker: Matthew Boyd is an award-winning cinematographer and director based mostly in Oakland, California, working in characteristic movie, brief movie, documentary, and tv. His work has been featured on Netflix, HBO Documentary Movies, Showtime, theatrically, and in movie festivals worldwide. He’s at present in manufacturing on Barren Grounds, his feature-length directorial debut.
Concerning the Contest: Now in its eleventh season, the Yale Atmosphere 360 Movie Contest honors the yr’s finest environmental documentaries, with the goal of recognizing work that has not beforehand been broadly seen. This yr we obtained 714 submissions from 91 international locations throughout six continents, with the winners chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning creator Elizabeth Kolbert, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Thomas Lennon, and e360’s government editor Roger Cohn.