The Shepherdess Who Beat an Army and Can Smell Her Cows' Lunch

A Montenegrin pastoralist fights NATO's plans for her mountain — and wins. 'To Hold a Mountain' is documentary filmmaking as slow-burn act of witness.

Mileva 'Gara' Jovanović doesn't have a publicist. She has goats that keep escaping. This is a useful thing to know going into 'To Hold a Mountain,' the Montenegrin documentary that won the grand jury prize for world cinema documentary at Sundance 2025 and has since toured Sarajevo, London, and Copenhagen on what can only be described as a victory lap. The film began as an act of resistance and ended as something rarer: a document of a resistance that actually worked. Directors Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić spent eight years in Gara's orbit on the Sinjajevina plateau, a high-altitude grazing commons threatened by Montenegro's government, which planned to convert it into a NATO military training and weapons testing facility. That's the political spine. But what the film does with it is more interesting than advocacy: it uses the threat as a lens to look at an entire way of life — transhumance, the ancient practice of seasonal livestock migration between highland summers and lowland winters — and asks what it costs when that life disappears. Gara is extraordinary documentary subject material in ways that go beyond her politics. She knows each cow, sheep, pony, and sheepdog by name. She can identify herbs by the smell of her cows' burps after they've grazed the highest pastures. She left the city — where she worked a factory job, couldn't cover her children's needs, and found her managers intolerable — and returned to the mountain specifically because no one could be her boss there. 'Freedom does not have a price,' she says, and in her mouth it doesn't sound like a bumper sticker. The film's structural patience earns its emotional payoff. Tutorov and Glomazić don't rush to the protest footage. They establish the physical reality of the mountain first: the off-grid cabin, the bucket washing, the wolves that threaten the flock, the violent storms. By the time Gara walks into a claustrophobic government corridor to face a masked military officer defending his plans, the contrast is devastating. The film has built its argument through accumulation, not argument. Nada, Gara's youngest daughter, threads through the film from age 12 to young adulthood — painting her nails, sharing a bed with her mother in the tiny cabin, now 20 and studying biology with hopes of becoming a microbiologist. The mother-daughter relationship gives the film its emotional architecture. Tutorov says she first knew she wanted to make the film when she watched Gara embrace Nada — something fierce in the shepherdess's protectiveness that mapped directly onto the defence of the mountain. The film was essentially finished when the government abruptly cancelled its military plans in summer 2025. Tutorov and Glomazić reopened the edit, missed two festival premieres, and put the victory in. That decision — to delay, to include the win — reveals what kind of filmmakers they are. This was always a film about the people, not just the cause. There is a personal story at the film's core — involving abuse, grief, and survival — that the article rightly refuses to spoil, and which Gara herself chose to share after years of trust-building with the crew. That the film carries this story without sensationalising it is its quietest achievement. Gara frames her own telling in collective terms: 'It's not just my story. It's the story of all women.' The mountain, it turns out, is not only a physical place. It's a structure of meaning that holds everything else up.