08/04/2025 - Petra Seliškar observes the life of three shepherd brothers, along with their sheep, cows and dogs, high up in the Šar Mountains in North Macedonia

Usually, documentary projects spend more time in development and production than fiction ones do. Having two projects premiering some two months apart at reputable festivals is an oddity which has happened to Slovenian filmmaker Petra Seliškar this year. After the premiere of her mid-length effort My Summer Holiday at FIPADOC in January, the filmmaker now presents her feature-length work The Mountain Won’t Move at Visions du Réel. It is no coincidence, though, because the two films share the same subjects, location and topic.

Seliškar takes us up into the Šar Mountains, where three brothers, Zekir, Zarif and Zani spend several months a year looking after their family’s flock of hundreds of sheep and their dozens of cows. The youngest, Zani, stays in the lower hut with the cows, while Zekir and Zarif venture to the upper “bachilo” stone-and-wood house with the sheep. During the summer, their younger brothers join them to learn the trade and provide help. Their life is free from the burdens of modernity, but also quite dangerous owing to the harsh weather and even harsher beasts. Luckily, they have a large number of shepherd dogs to protect them and keep them company. Zekir serves as the leader of the brothers and the teacher, preparing them to continue the centuries-old tradition, but as Zarif grows, he expresses an interest in trying out a different, more modern way of life. Zekir is also at a crossroads, as he is getting too old to spend such an amount of time up in the mountains with the sheep, while he also misses his favourite dog, Belichka, who is being held by a shady breeder.

The filmmaker is less interested in telling a story here (the mid-length is more structured to serve this purpose) than she is in observing the relations between the brothers, and those between them and the breathtaking nature that surrounds them. And in such isolation (some of the shooting locations are at an altitude of over 2,400 metres), where the only structure comes in the form of daily routines, the young men’s minds tend to go into overdrive. The occasional bouts of narration that Seliškar applies are both matter-of-fact and poetic, so they better succeed in painting a picture of the mental states, rather than in driving the story, which is also the filmmaker’s intention.

Technically, The Mountain Won’t Move is a maverick work. The filming took place over several weeks-long spans during a period of five years, and the locations are not exactly accessible, so the image- and sound-recording crews had to follow the subjects around during their mundane, repetitive work for days on end over the harsh terrain, taking care not to step into the others’ line of sight and not to disturb the harmony between the animals. The end result is nothing short of amazing on a sensory level. From cinematographer Brand Ferro’s point of view, we can see both the beauty and the danger of the place in bright, summery colours and crisp, digital visuals. This beauty and danger are further enhanced through Vladimir Rakić’s sound design, in which we can make out individual noises over the overall natural cacophony, while the austere use of Iztok Koren’s ethno-sounding music is also a nice touch.

For sure, there are parallels to be drawn with other documentaries about people in nature and people on the fringes of society, as Seliškar is not trying to redefine these sub-genres. However, The Mountain Won’t Move is a deeply personal work and a frank, in-depth observation of an endangered way of life.

The Mountain Won’t Move is a co-production between Slovenia, France and North Macedonia, through Petra Pan Film, Cinéphage Productions and PPFP. Open Kitchen Films handles the world sales.