“So compelling, and so beautifully shot, that To Hold a Mountain manages to rise above its uneven parts.”

Darlin’ am I, Like a bird out passin’, Your house[…]
It was a moment ago, But when I’d woken,
The mountains arose
— “Inkstones”, Wickerbird

Oddly enough, To Hold a Mountain feels like two different films coexisting within the same documentary. The first is the one most often described in press materials: a story about the steely resilience of a mother and daughter defending their ancestral mountain in the Montenegro highlands from being turned into a NATO military training ground. While compelling, this description barely scratches the surface of what the film actually contains. The second film, far more interesting and ultimately more accurate, is a quiet observation of the daily lives of two women as they care for their land and livestock, make artisanal cheese, and above all, care for one another. This mutual care is what makes their harsh existence possible, whether they are facing the unforgiving conditions of the mountain or the external pressure to abandon everything they have built.

Unsurprisingly, the film often adopts an “us against the world” narrative. Tutorov and Glomazić never shy away from intimate moments between mother and daughter: sharing a bed to keep warm through the night, or Nada tenderly washing her mother Gara’s hair. Day after day, they function like two parts of a single engine, each enabling the other to keep going. Caring for one another and caring for the land are presented as one and the same task. However, To Hold a Mountain’s dual structure does not always work seamlessly, even if it helps convey the magnitude of what is at stake. For much of its runtime, the documentary feels like a private journal we are allowed to peer into, with moments of beauty and vulnerability laid bare by the filmmakers. But a tonal shift that reframes Gara not only as a mother but also as an ecoactivist, or someone who understands the damage a military base could inflict on one of the few places where nature has managed to endure, feels underdeveloped. And it is here that the film’s main structural issue emerges.

What begins as a seemingly casual conversation between Gara and a neighbor about wolves attacking sheep gradually shifts in tone when she reminds him that they need people at the rally the next day. From that point on, the film changes direction. The intimate close-ups disappear, replaced by wider and more explicitly political images: Gara on horseback, crowds gathering around her, voices chanting “I’m still here,” asserting that even small numbers can make noise. Meanwhile, tanks and helicopters become an increasingly common presence. Yet these two narrative strands, the intimate domestic portrait and the political struggle, are not given equal weight. By the time the film ends, we know surprisingly little about NATO’s specific interests in the region or about the scope of Gara’s activism. A brief scene showing her confronting military generals during a televised debate is the closest the film comes to depicting a direct clash between opposing sides.

Fortunately, the relationship between Gara and Nada, and their deep connection to their land, animals, and neighbors, is so compelling, and so beautifully shot, that To Hold a Mountain manages to rise above its uneven parts. In the end, even after Gara’s activism begins to yield tangible results, what lingers most strongly are her conversations with her daughter and the women of her village.

This is the true core of To Hold a Mountain: women caring for one another, and how that solidarity is inseparable from the success of their struggle. Their fight for preservation evokes a sense of tradition rooted in a relationship to nature, not in mythologized national histories or military glory, but in lived experience, endurance, and collective care, almost as if these women were saying to one another, and to the mountain itself, “And I don’t know why, why the ocean’s still holding me tight, but scrying waves in the sky, I suppose I could stay for a time.” And so they stay.