Christophe Farnarier

A man leaves everything and disappears in the mountains.

Going far beyond the standard imagery of Rasta—ganja, reggae, and dreadlocks—this cultural history offers an uncensored vision of a movement with complex roots and the exceptional journey of a man who taught an enslaved people how to be proud and impose their culture on the world. In the 1920s Leonard Percival Howell and the First Rastas had a revelation concerning the divinity of Haile Selassie, king of Ethiopia, that established the vision for the most popular mystical movement of the 20th century, Rastafarianism. Although jailed, ridiculed, and treated as insane, Howell, also known as the Gong, established a Rasta community of 4,500 members, the first agro-industrial enterprise devoted to producing marijuana. In the late 1950s the community was dispersed, disseminating Rasta teachings throughout the ghettos of the island. A young singer named Bob Marley adopted Howell's message, and through Marley's visions, reggae made its explosion in the music world.

From the beginning of time, a man walks in front of his flock to the rhythm of the seasons. The nomadic shepherd belongs to our collective imagination. Joan "Pipa" is one of the last representatives of an ancient tradition. We accompany him on his last nomadic trip to the Catalan Pyrenees. Day after day he we share his intimacy, we discover the past and present of a man who loves his job and breathes the joy of living freely in nature. But the abandonment of land, industrialization and rampant growth, urbanistic fever, the multiplication of new infrastructure and now climate change end the dream and lead to an uncertain future. Is the disappearance of transhumance a sign of progress, or the death of our civilization?.

Short film.