It's a shame that the strapline for this touching little film - "One Family's Quest to Breed the Perfect Sheep" - is rather at odds with the film itself.
"Addicted to Sheep" is a meandering, quiet, funny, touching, deeply fascinating look at a life lived in...well...the middle of nowhere. Although I was brought up in Dorset, I'm a townie at heart and the daily grind of this North Pennines family looks terrifyingly grim to me. But the family - especially the children - cope with it all amazingly well. There's a real love lived out in these bleak landscapes.
The opening shot is hilarious, as the farmer catalogues a list of what's wrong with his sheep...but the pay-off at the end is the perfect counterpoint. In the meantime, there's plenty of sheep action, but no sign of a "quest" (this is just PR guff). Instead, we get birth, death, castration and plenty of mopping out of cow sheds. Thankfully there is no 'throughline' to this film - director Magali Pettier points her camera and captures what happens, and that is really what makes this such a charming exercise.
There are off-hand mentions of money (or lack of it), of how the parents want to make sure their children are fed and clothed, but there's no whinging about government policies - this is an apolitical film. It is also entirely unsentimental, viz the stillborn lamb chucked casually into a bucket. The film might ultimately be "heartwarming", but that doesn't mean there are a few moments that can still shock.
The family loves their farm, and their sheep, but it's always clear that the sheep are commodities. That's not a value judgement or a criticism, it's just a fact.
"Addicted to Sheep" has echoes of those classic b/w documentaries of the 1950s from Basil Wright or Lindsay Anderson. It even smacks of one of the more bleaker 1960s "Look at Life" featurettes (sans the Alan Wicker-style narration).
I loved it.