Joe Wells is a practising Catholic who believes 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. He tends to his sheep in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, USA.

But while 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”.

With Wells himself providing a rustic violin score, the video captures how this ancient profession quietly endures, in many ways unchanged, even in the most industrialised countries.

View the original video here.

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