View at Vimeo.
The village of Brill in Buckinghamshire, where my father-in-law lives, has a unique program to maintain the common with a collectively owned herd of Dexter cattle. For this haiku video, I borrowed the idea of making a postcard come to life from the poetry filmmakers Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, who used it to great effect in an adaptation of one of my haibun, In West Virginia (which isn’t yet available for streaming on the web).
I suppose it was precisely the pro-biodiversity, feel-good quality of Brill’s cattle herding program that brought the baseline misery of livestock into sharp relief for me.