A Hundred Weathers review – a year on a Lakeland hill farm, and a masterpiece

Joel Ackroyd spent 14 months on a hill farm above Buttermere with a camera and, as far as I can tell, no agenda beyond paying attention. The result is a documentary of 118 minutes without a single interview, a line of narration or a caption, and it is the most moving film I have seen this year.

The farm belongs to Dorothy and Alan Steadman, who are in their 70s, and whose son has told them, in a conversation we hear only from the next room, that he will not be taking it on. The film begins at the November tup sales in Cockermouth and ends at the following October’s, and in between it simply watches: lambing in a snowstorm, a gathering on the fell with three dogs and a quad bike, a vet’s visit that does not end well, a kitchen table where a letter from the bank sits unopened for what the light tells us is at least a week.

Ackroyd, whose previous film was a 40-minute short about a Grimsby fish auction, has an extraordinary eye for the moment before something happens. His camera is always already in the right place: on the gate before the sheep hit it, on Dorothy’s face before she decides not to say something. The editing, by Rosa Imbert, moves at the pace of weather, which is to say it can take an age and then change everything in a cut.

The sound is as important as the picture. There is no music. There are, instead, the particular acoustics of a Herdwick flock in fog, the squeak of a wet gate, Radio Cumbria half-heard from a Land Rover, and, late on, the sound of Alan singing to a ewe he is trying to persuade to take an orphaned lamb. It is the only time in the film anyone sings, and I am not ashamed to say the row in front of me at the Sheffield documentary festival was in pieces.

What the film refuses to do is explain. There are no statistics about hill farming subsidy, no expert in a jumper telling us what has gone wrong. The Steadmans are not symbols of anything; they are two people doing a hard job well while knowing that nobody will do it after them. The politics are entirely present and entirely unspoken, and the film is stronger for it.

The last 10 minutes, at the tup sales again, are as perfectly judged an ending as I can remember. I will say only that Ackroyd finds, in a Cumbrian auction mart, something close to a benediction.

A Hundred Weathers is released in selected cinemas on 23 October, with a wider release in November.