Premiering at Sundance, To Hold a Mountain traces how one shepherd’s devotion to her child and her mountain becomes an unflinching stand against militarization.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
To Hold A Mountain, which won this year’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentary film at Sundance, accomplishes something remarkable. By remaining focused with meditative intensity on the quiet day-to-day of its subjects, the film presents an argument both deeply affecting and more effective than if its message were emblazoned across every frame. As the festival jury aptly put it, To Hold a Mountain, directed by Bijana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, represents “the truest example of the power of cinema to make the personal political.”
In the remote mountains of Montenegro, a small community of herders tend their sheep and cattle, making cheese, harvesting wool, and maintaining traditions that have persisted for generations. But they also must passionately defend their rural life against the incursions of NATO, which wants to use their land as a military training ground because of its isolation and rugged terrain. To Hold a Mountain follows the leader of the protest movement, a staunchly loving and protective woman named Gara, and her young charge, Nada.
In between protests … Gara performs the strenuous labor of life on the mountain without complaint.
Never clearly tracking dates, except in the change of seasons, the film allows time to ebb and flow between the vicissitudes of the small family’s activities, as Gara and Nada milk cows, herd sheep, feed animals, nap in fields amidst their flock, raise kittens and make cheese. When Nada is home from school, which she reluctantly attends in the city, she and Gara sleep in the same tiny bed in a small, cozy cabin nestled in the midst of the stunningly gorgeous but unyielding mountains.
In between protests, to which Gara rides her hardy mare to lead chants with her neighbors, and the occasional television appearance where she argues with military officials in favor of her community’s peace and prosperity, Gara performs the strenuous labor of life on the mountain without complaint. She takes great pride in her cheese, made in the traditional way, with fresh milk from her sheep stored and preserved in dried sheepskin she prepares herself. She works quietly and with conviction, in rhythms tried and tested over generations. When sheep go astray, she and Nada march out into the fields to find them. When calves or cattle suffer insurmountable injury, she handles the euthanasia herself, merciful but resolved.
At the same time, Gara mourns the loss of her sister, Mira, killed years earlier by an abusive husband, and worries over Nada, whom she has raised as her own since Mira’s death, especially when news reaches them that Nada’s father will soon be released from prison. Nada barely remembers her mother but is as close to Gara as a daughter can be, although she enacts the familiar push-pull of adolescence as she ages over the course of the film.
“A mother has to be strong like a lioness,” a friend tells Gara. And, on top of the film’s sincere defense of the lifestyle of the herders and shepherds it closely hews to, this is the abiding message of To Hold a Mountain: the vitality and strength of mothers, as champions of their young and stewards of nature, both of which need protection and space to grow.
