Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life — sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.
UCLA graduate student Charles Burnett shot the film in roughly a year of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, paid for partially by a $3,000 Louis B. Mayer and also out of the pocket of the director himself, who at the time was working at Chasin, Park & Citron, a small, boutique casting agency.
Filmed on location with a mostly amateur cast, much handheld camera work, and an episodic narrative with gritty documentary-style cinematography, Killer of Sheep has been compared by film critics and scholars to Italian neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan. Burnett cites Basil Wright’s Songs of Ceylon and Night Mail and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner as his main influences.
