Do you have eight hours to spare and enjoy watching sheep?
If you do, ‘Baa Baa Land’ might just the film for you. Developed by Calm, a mindfulness company, the film devotes its lengthy run time entirely to the exploits of a flock of sheep. Not an animated or fictionalized flock of sheep, but an actual flock of sheep.
While the spoof marketing referencing ‘La La Land’ might make you think there’s more to this film, don’t be fooled. The film really does focus only on sheep standing around in a field doing, well, sheep stuff. And to top it all off, it’s filmed in slow motion.
‘Baa Baa Land’ is a part of the growing ‘slow cinema’ genre, which features little to no dialogue and extremely long takes.
More specifically, the eight-hour sheep-based epic is an homage to Andy Warhol’s film ‘Empire.’ Released in 1964, ‘Empire’ consists entirely of slow motion footage of the Empire State Building. Calm founder Michael Acton Smith said that “many laughed at ‘Empire’ but now its considered a classic.”
Smith went on to applaud ‘Baa Baa Land’ for being the dullest film ever made, hoping that viewers can “sit back, wind down, and drift off to the sheep and find peaceful calm in a world of constant stress and information overload.”
While that is an admirable sentiment, do we really need eight hours of sheep grazing in a field? Certainly two or three hours would be enough, right?
Check out the trailer below:
The film is set to premiere sometime this September at the Prince Charles Cinema in London.
And in farm animal-related news, check out Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’
