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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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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes