The documentary Grass is incredible!

I watched this because it was a silent film and I generally love those, but I was not expecting this to be the amazing experience it was!

So early in the 1920s two friends, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, fronted up in Turkey with their cameras and headed east to see if they could find something interesting to film. After a bit of meandering, which makes up the very beginning of the movie, they ran into the subject of a lifetime – the migration of the Bakhtiari people of Persia who move en masse from one grazing land to another with the change of the seasons. 50,000 people and all of their animals – 200,000 animals? – on the move together, facing incredible geographical challenges as they go— it’s an amazing sight. Snow-covered mountain ranges and fast-running glacial rivers stand in their way…

Thanks to this documentary, I now know how to loads goats onto an improvised raft, and also that you can load a surprising number of goats on one with the right technique.

The toughness and courage of the people is incredible, and the filmmakers also included the little touches that make these kinds of films so watchable, like the baby goat who rides the whole way on different animals, and seems to be having a great time.

Only a couple years after they made this, a road was put in and this migration never happened again in that form. It’s one of the first ethnographic films ever made, and the two guys went on to Hollywood where they … made King Kong!

Anyway, I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet!