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 space ranch, he strikes the animals every few days to overgrown meadows, grasslands, and forests near properties, colleges, and completely different buildings that are vulnerable to wildfire.
Targeted grazing is a follow that goes once more centuries, and Aliaga — whose earnings help his partner and three children in Peru — realized at a youthful age strategies to take care of animals from his dad and mother and grandparents. “This was handed down by the use of generations,” he says. In distinction to thinning with tools, Aliaga’s goats don’t spill oil, spark fires, or disturb the soil. “That’s additional pure,” he says, “and on the same time they’re fertilizing the land.” The goats are notably desirous to eat the leaves of poison oak and French broom, which might be powerful to remove by hand.
Filmmaker Matthew Boyd adopted Aliaga, who works alone apart from for two border collies, in the middle of the dry summer season season grazing seasons between 2020 and 2022. What did Boyd hope his viewers would take away from his lyrical, contemplative film? “I wanted to supply viewers a glimpse right into a simpler, old-world lifestyle — in nature, alone with the animals.” And with hearth season starting ever earlier throughout the West, he added, it was important for him to exhibit “environmentally sound methods of mitigating wildfires in a land so continuously devastated by them.”
In regards to the Filmmaker: Matthew Boyd is an award-winning cinematographer and director primarily based in Oakland, California, working in operate film, fast film, documentary, and television. His work has been featured on Netflix, HBO Documentary Films, Showtime, theatrically, and in film festivals worldwide. He is in the meanwhile in manufacturing on Barren Grounds, his feature-length directorial debut.
In regards to the Contest: Now in its eleventh season, the Yale Environment 360 Film Contest honors the 12 months’s best environmental documentaries, with the intention of recognizing work that has not beforehand been broadly seen. This 12 months we obtained 714 submissions from 91 worldwide places all through six continents, with the winners chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Thomas Lennon, and e360’s govt editor Roger Cohn.