‘Goats are good. They listen’: the herder who defeated Montenegro’s military – and can identify her cows’ herby burps

The star of 'To Hold a Mountain' is having trouble with her goats, which keep escaping. So my interview with Mileva 'Gara' Jovanović is rescheduled to a moment where the animals are under control and Gara can descend from the peaks to her small winter residence in a small village near the capital of Podgorica, for a video call.

'You have to take care of them because they are always searching for their paths,' says Gara, whose Montenegrin is translated into English by Biljana Tutorov, the joint writer-director of the stunning film about Gara's life in the mountains of Sinjajevina. 'But the goats are good, especially when they know the shepherdess. I'm a good shepherdess. They listen to me.'

Mountain Warrior

People listen to Gara too, as Tutorov and her partner and co-writer/director Petar Glomazić discovered eight years ago. Their epic commitment to filming this pastoralist community, whose way of life is threatened, has been rewarded: 'To Hold a Mountain' has swept up prizes on the festival circuit after winning the grand jury prize for world cinema documentary at Sundance earlier this year.

Ancient Wisdom

Glomazić hails from a family of herders, and understood the ancient transhumance culture, whereby graziers move their livestock to the high peaks for summer grazing and live alongside them before ushering them back to the lowlands when the winter snows arrive. Tutorov fell in love with the vivid light of Sinjajevina ('It felt like a big stage for a big story,' she says) and was also moved by the way she saw Gara embracing Nada, her 12-year-old daughter.

The film-makers first met Gara when she spoke at a rally against the government's plans to turn a swath of the mountains into a Nato military training and weapons testing facility. Gara recognised that the film-makers possessed 'the power to actually move this mountain and to walk it around the world'.

Freedom's Price

To do so, Tutorov, Glomazić and their small crew devoted years to immersing themselves in Gara's physically brutal working life. Her small summer cabin is off-grid: water must be hauled from a well; washing is by bucket; food is cooked on a wood-fired stove. Low cloud, violent storms and early snows sweep through as the shepherds keep their sheep safe from wolves, and rescue errant cows on vast hillsides.

Gara knows each cow, sheep, pony and sheepdog as an individual, and usually by name. No part of her livestock is wasted: skins of sheep are used as vessels for cheese-making; manure is gathered and sold to gardeners. 'We don't want to work in a private store for €300 a month,' Gara tells her fellow herders as they fight for their right to exist.

Victory Lap

The film was finished in the summer of 2025 when the government abruptly cancelled its plans for the military area. 'We had the film done and invitations to two big festivals, and then we decided to reopen the edit and skip the planned premieres,' says Tutorov. 'They were so generous in sharing their most intimate moments, and we thought: we have to put in this moment of victory.'