A crew of college kids made a documentary about sheep herders in Iceland that’s worth watching.

Ollie Smith, Josh Fairmont, and Jesse Smolan from Caution Media, a production house, were seniors at Colorado College last year when they applied for and received a documentary filmmaking grant that enabled them to turn a senior project into a full-fledged feature film, which was supported by Flylow. The idea was to travel to Iceland and follow along with local farmers and landowners during réttir, the annual Icelandic sheep round-up, held in September, that has become a community and cultural tradition. 

Each September, Icelandic communities gather up free-grazing sheep and get them back into enclosures before snow and winter arrive. The filmmakers wanted to capture the spirit of this age-old tradition, which is slowly fading away, and speak to the field workers about the land, the animals, and why this tradition still matters.

“The hardest part of filming this project is the sheep herders had a job to do. They had to get their sheep back,” says Ollie Smith, a skier and filmmaker who competes on the Freeride World Qualifier tour and is a recent graduate of Colorado College. “In those moments, we’re just in the background, trying to stay out of the way.”

The film, which will be debuting at the Newport Beach Film Festival and the Reykjavik International Film Festival, is called Fjalfero. It was shot on location around northern Iceland. “The easiest part? Everywhere you looked was absurdly beautiful,” adds Smith. “You’d walk around a corner and there’s a volcano with a rainbow over it. That makes for pretty easy filmmaking.”