Killing the Shepherd

Directed by Thomas Opre, Killing the Shepherd is a slow-moving documentary focused on the elderly chief of a small African village and her efforts at combating poverty amongst her almost uniformly impoverished citizens. There’s ultimately little doubt that Killing the Shepherd, for the most part, comes off as a well-meaning yet completely uninvolving endeavor that contains few elements, if any, worth getting entirely excited by or interested in, as filmmaker Opre delivers a relentlessly dry piece of work that touches on a variety of potentially intriguing topics but leaves most of them distressingly (and disappointingly) far from fleshed-out. (This is especially true of Opre’s all-too-brief portrait of a 14-year-old sold into an arranged marriage, with the potentially heartbreaking bent of this story squandered by its head-scratching lack of screentime.) It does, as such, remain clear that the movie probably would’ve fared better had it been trimmed down significantly and appeared as a short piece on a primetime news program, as the padded-out end product is simply unable to make the searing impact for which Opre is quite obviously striving – with the inclusion of some striking images and a handful of unexpected twists generally preventing the viewer from checking out completely. The final result is a missed opportunity that fails to engage for virtually the duration of its short-yet-not-short-enough 73 minutes, which is a shame, really, given the potential afforded by the picture’s searing true-life subject matter.

** out of ****