The daft new stressbuster: an 8-hour film about sheep ... called Baa Baa Land!

Its total lack of action’s meant to be soothing. But it drove JAN MOIR bleating mad

FOLLOWING two hours of constant bleating, you start to hate sheep. After six hours, you stop hearing them, ears defeated by the onslaught.

After eight hours you will reel out of the cinema, ready to murder a mutton biryani, a Lancashire hotpot, a pile of lamb cutlets with those darling paper frills stuck triumphantly on the end of each annoying, maddening, little bone. even if you are a vegetarian, you will still have these feelings, I promise you.

In fact, you will be ready to murder any woolly ruminant unlucky enough to cross your path. With your bare hands. While laughing manically and shouting: ‘bring me the mint sauce, mother!’

baa baa Land is an eight-hour film starring a bunch of sheep who live in a field in essex. There is no plot, no dialogue, no human actors and very little structure. Yes, it is very much like The only Way Is essex, only with less fake tan and clearer diction.

At one point, about six hours in, some of the sheep mount an expedition to go to the water butt for a drink. However — for flock’s sake! — that is the beginning and the end of anything even approaching an action sequence. Sometimes the sheep stand up. Sometimes they lie down. Mostly they just eat grass and bleat and bleat and bleat.

Is this the dullest film ever made? ‘We think so,’ says producer Peter Freedman. ‘And we hope audiences will, too.’

Shot on location on Layer Marney Lamb farm near Tiptree in essex, baa baa Land is one of the first examples of ‘slow cinema’, a genre of arty films characterised by long takes, a slow pace and a complete lack of plot or narrative drive. Its not-so-rapid rise follows ‘slow TV’, a phenomenon originating in Norway where TV execs marked the centenary of a railway line by broadcasting a sevenhour train trip. It was a runaway hit. S

INCE then, Bbc Four has devoted hours to ‘deliberately unhurried’ programming, featuring the dawn chorus in devon, a two-hour narrowboat journey along the Kennet and Avon Canal and the making of a glass jug.

Meanwhile, radio 3 has led the charge for ‘slow radio’, earlier this year broadcasting the sounds of a 12-mile hike through the black Mountains.

Audiences are supposed to embark on a meditative journey, enchanted by the atmosphere of peace and absence of stimulus.

baa baa Land premiered at the Prince Charles Cinema in the West end of London last week. They even had sheepy stars on the red carpet, but no jokes about mutton dressed as lamb, please, the oscars are months away.

on the same day, Calm.com, the California-based meditation app that produced the epic, premiered the film online (you can still watch it for free) with the aim of helping to cure insomnia. The trailer proclaims it’s a ‘tonic for the soul’.

Can that be true? I went to a preview screening to find out, along with my knitting ( nice bit of symmetry there), a book, my phone and a cheese sandwich to keep me going. Let the revels begin!

baa baa Land opens on a cloudy spring morning. There is jaunty, bake off-style music, but no voiceover to tell us what is going on.

That’s fine, because nothing is going on. The sheep are already up and eating, which they do without remittance for the rest of the day.

Their ruminations are captured by what appears to be a fixed camera in a corner of the field, which can, and does, stay focused on the same shot for more than an hour. Stop me if I’m boring you . . .

each sheep is identified by a number sprayed onto its fleece with bright blue paint. Would it be so very hard to use a suitably bucolic shade from Farrow & ball? Anyway, here comes Mummy X3 and her triplets, unimaginatively called X3, X3 and X3. It makes Sixtus rees-Mogg look like a triumph of individualism.

For the first two hours, I do find baa baa Land rather lovely. As the sun rises, a mood of reflective calm steals across my tormented soul. Soon the mind unhitches, like a hot air balloon shaking clear of its moorings, ready to bounce free and think great, important, existential thoughts about life, death and lamb chops. L

ook at that crow flying across the field. I quite fancy a sheepskin rug. Strange that all sheep look as though someone has shaved their faces. I wonder if there is a John Lewis near here.

but it is by no means the longest flick ever made. That honour goes to Logistics, a Swedish experiential art film made in 2012, which lasts for 35 days and 17 hours, following the journey of a gadget being imported from China. baa baa’s rivals for the title of most boring include a ten-and-a-halfhour film about paint drying called Paint drying, and Crude oil, a must-miss 14-hours about oil workers in the Gobi desert.

The slow genre seems to have had more success on television. The beeb’s All Aboard! The Sleigh ride, a two-hour film of a reindeer trek in the Arctic Circle, was a hit at Christmas 2015. In All Aboard! The Country bus, Bbc Four followed a bus journey through Yorkshire for two hours.

I enjoyed both. In The Sleigh ride, only the sound of reindeer bells broke the peace of the snowscape. In the second, the low hum of the bus engine did not spoil the raw majesty of the countryside.

While baa baa Land may have its moments, the baa-baaing itself is ultimately the problem. The bleats perfectly capture the pitch of a whining child. eight hours of this is about six hours too much.

However, one does become rather fond of the sheep. They are so placid, so content with their lot. Quite a few spend a great deal of time with their bottoms facing the cameras, but that never did Kelly brook any harm.

As baa baa Land finally draws to a close, there is no recognition of time passing, no diminution of daylight or sense of an ending.

It’s over when the sheep lie down, exhausted — and I know just how they feel.