A scene from Bitterbrush (Alejandro Mejia/Magnolia Pictures)

Following two female cattle range riders over the course of one season, director Emelie Mahdavian’s understated documentary Bitterbrush fully leans into the cinema verité style. The drive turns out to have few obstacles for the cowgirls, and ends up more as a landscape portrait.

The two young women, Hollyn Patterson and Collie Moline, tend to a herd of cattle over a large terrain in Idaho. Right off the bat, we get that these two are not strangers hired to do a job together, but very good friends. Patterson is the more extroverted of the two, while Moline is reserved. Many of the best moments are of Patterson’s stream-of-consciousness meanderings. She has some nearly laugh-out-loud moments, such as when she asks one of the herd dogs, “Are you overworked and underpaid?”

Director Mahdavian is adamant in her interviews that she wanted to make Bitterbrush about just one season of these women’s job, and her film takes an observational approach to Patterson and Moline’s work and lifestyle. While she and her crew capture plenty of luscious scenery and candid moments between the women (and their helper dogs), this method of vérité style also means that there is little external conflict on the journey. Mahdavian calls her film a “portrait of friendship.”

The closest viewers come to understanding Patterson and Moline’s hardships occurs as they sit around a campfire reflecting on their lives or pondering the future. The film has a singular focus—the cowgirls doing their jobs—interwoven with these episodic reflections. The pattern repeats until the summer comes.

Though the female range riders appear to be the selling point in the film’s trailer, the filmmakers go out of their way to never delve into the gender politics of ranching, the Mountain States, or anything for that matter, which is actually refreshing considering how the majority of films and television these days are so hyper-political. In that regard, Bitterbrush succeeds. Mahdavian and her crew achieve what they have set out to do: craft a portrait of a partnership.