Summer Pasture | Telescope Film
Summer Pasture

Summer Pasture

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  • China,
  • United States
  • 2011
  • · 85m

Director Nelson Walker
Cast Locho, Yama
Genre Documentary, Drama

Locho and Yama are a young Tibetan couple who live as nomadic yak herders, the way that their ancestors did 4,000 years ago. This documentary offers an intimate portrait of a family struggling to continue their traditional way of life, even as outside pressures force them to integrate with an ever-modernizing outside world.

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What are critics saying?

80

Variety

A remarkably intimate documentary woven out of tradition and change, and the endearing subjects who contend with both.

80

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

80

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.

80

Variety by John Anderson

A remarkably intimate documentary woven out of tradition and change, and the endearing subjects who contend with both.

75

Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier

The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.

70

Village Voice

Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.

70

Village Voice by Benjamin Mercer

Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.

60

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

The subjects - a husband and wife struggling to make ends meet, mostly for the well-being of their infant daughter - are eminently engaging.