The Shepherd and the Bear: Entrancing documentary questions the ethics of rewilding

Max Keegan’s gorgeous documentary about the reintroduction of wild bears in the French Pyrenees sets out to give equal heed to those opposed and those in favour. It ends up siding, at least cinematically, with the former. 

It’s hard to blame Keegan for being won over by shepherds who have “grazed their animals in the mountains […] for thousands of years” and for whom “the Bear” represents the final existential threat. The lion’s share of the film’s running time is given over to this tight-knit community’s grievances against the bears and the “city people” who champion them – the threat to their livestock, the absurd prohibition against shooting bears even in self-defence. The opposition is most effectively embodied by Yves, the shepherd of the title – a grizzled, stoical sixtysomething. Keegan evokes the stereotype of the Vanishing Indian in westerns as well as, in one terrifying bear encounter, horror film tropes. 

For the filmmaker, Yves and the remote landscape he inhabits are entrancing. As clouds move sinuously through the mountains, so too do lines of woolly sheep through medieval stone villages, and up into the mist-shrouded high pastures, accompanied by an alternately ominous and elegiac score by Amine Bouhafa (Four Daughters, 2023). The vérité filmmaking entailed the director embedding with the inhabitants of the southern French department of Ariège for two years. It is sad when Lisa, Yves’s young apprentice, has to give up on a shepherding career. Her replacement – a middle-aged musician seeking ‘self-actualisation’ – gives it a go, culminating in a scene rich in metaphorical potential in which he shoulders an injured ewe for an impossibly arduous climb. Shortly afterwards, he leaves too. 

At a disadvantage on the pro-bear side of the argument is Cyril, a nature-loving local teenager newly enfeebled by pancreatitis and diabetes. Whether Keegan intends it or not, Cyril’s bear fixation comes across as naive, if endearingly so – this isn’t the maddeningly hubristic bear obsession documented in Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) – and is constantly undercut by his scene-stealing anti-bear mother. 

Still, there’s another reason not to blame Keegan for siding with the shepherd. His audience is likely better versed in, and more sympathetic to, environmentalist arguments for rewilding – arguments that from the shepherds’ perspective seem detached, platitudinous and hypocritical. Keegan’s film restores some balance to this debate, and hopefully others, by seeding greater understanding of the humans within the ecosystems we seek to conserve. 

► The Shepherd and the Bear is UK cinemas 6 February 2026.