Baa Baa Land: The 'dullest movie ever' that will put you to 'sheep'

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Having trouble falling asleep? You might want to visit London’s Prince Charles Cinema in September for an eight-hour, slow-motion film featuring hundreds of bleating sheep entitled “Baa Baa Land” -- you know, after the other musical produced by Hollywood.

The movie, which consists completely of slow-motion shots of sheep on pasture going about their day, was shot in Essex, England, and was produced by Calm, a California-based company that provides digital mindfulness meditation products.

The movie prides itself as a “slow motion epic” and the “dullest movie ever made,” and has taken the challenge of relieving the audience from stress and pressure and putting them to sleep.

Screenshot from the movie. /Photo via Calm.com

The film's producer Peter Freedman hoped in a statement that everyone think their movie is a snoozefest.

"We hope that audiences will (find it dull), too," he said.

The producing group is not dreaming big, however.

“(We) don’t expect it to break box-office records” but are confident that “at least a niche audience” would go for it, noted Michael Acton Smith, the film’s executive producer and co-founder of Calm.

The movie is said to be the latest example of the niche genre called slow cinema – a film-making approach that emphasizes long takes with minimal or no lines, dialogue or narration.

But the “sheep epic” is hardly the highlight of slow cinema’s history, or even the “dullest” eight hours ever.

A frame from Andy Warhol's Empire (1964).

Andy Warhol's picture captured on Andy Warhol Exhibition during New York Fashion Week. / VCG Photo

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) conceived a 485-minute long movie in 1964 that solely shot the Empire State Building in Manhattan, New York City. The eight hours of the movie, Empire, consist only of footage of the building at dusk and nothing more.

Slow cinema is sometimes called “contemplative cinema”.

Soviet filmmaker Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986), hailed as one of the most famous icons of this movie genre, once argued, “I think that what a person normally goes to cinema for is time.”

But killing time at a show does not necessarily mean attending a mindless production.

A stage drama “2666,” adapted from a novel with the same name by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, just rang the curtains down in north China’s Tianjin Municipality.

Despite lasting for 12 hours and unlike "Baa Baa Land" which celebrates its lack of liveliness, each performance does more than kill time for viewers. It tells the story of unresolved series of serial killing which happened in Mexico during the World War Two.

However, the promised eight hours of sheep staring contest is not without its own merits.

Rajkumar Dasgupta, assistant professor of clinical medicine at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, told the Huffington Post that “Baa Baa Land” could be a therapy-like method to help insomniacs.