To Live with Herds

Set silently and gently among the members of the Jie people in Uganda, the camera of the documentary To Live with Herds becomes an inseparable part of this specific environment. It is present in the most inconspicuous of ways, without ever affecting the flow of reality that supervenes before it, allowing a collective subject to appear and freely articulate its own discourse – to sketch out a portrait of its own self in the midst of major political change. Funny but also moving in a most understated way, and technically remarkable, the weave of its narrative thrilling, To Live With Herds stands out as one of the most important moments both of observational cinema and of the ethnographic documentary genre more generally – a now classic film that functions as a timeless reminder of the power that cinema has to apprehend truth (be it historical, political, or social) in its rawest, most primal form.