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Joe Wells is a practising Catholic who believes that his work as a shepherd gives him something of a window into the divine, with each day exposing him to cycles of life and death. But although he finds a meaningful resonance between his job and his faith, the day-to-day realities of his all-consuming work are unromantic at best and brutal at worst, leading him to conclude: ‘It’s a world you manipulate but you don’t control.’ The US filmmaker Vern Moen’s The Shepherd profiles Wells as he tends to his sheep in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. With Wells himself providing a rustic violin score, the sparse and poignant short captures how this millennia-old line of work quietly endures, in many ways unchanged, even in the most industrialised countries.
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes