Let me make it clear from the start. For me, The Story of the Weeping Camel is the best movie I saw last year, and by quite someway. In fact I would say it is without doubt the best Mongolian film I have ever seen. Admittedly there aren’t many around but what they lack in quantity they more than make up in quality.

The film follows a family of subsistance farmers living in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and surviving off the sheep and camels they keep. We meet the eight or so family members covering four generations at the start of the camel calving season. All is going well until the last calf of the season, a rare white camel, is born. After a particularly difficult delivery it is rejected by its mother. The main focus of the rest of the story is the family’s attempt to get the mother to accept the baby. So once again in a movie I am reviewing, it is not the dramatic plot which makes this movie so rewarding. Rather it is the way writer-dircetor Byambasuren Davaa so beautifully depicts the simple lives of these people.

There are many scenes of the family’s daily lives: eating meals, herding the animals, tantrums by the children. The interesting, and very effective, choice was made to only subtitle that dialogue which is important for advancing the story, meaning there are long stretches where we have no idea what is being said. This stops the viewer being distracted by the subtitles and allows them to truly be absorbed into the family’s world. After all, until we discover a Babel fish, this is what being in a foreign world is like. So instead we only get the feel of what is happen and it is left to the imagination to work out what is going on.

Like most people living a subsistance life, the family is extremely close to the land on which they live. We see some beautifully shot scenes of the barren, empty landscape but also get a sense of the potential for Nature to release its fury when a severe sandstorm hits. These are deeply spiritual people and we witness several of their ceremonies designed to ensure their continued survival in these harsh surroundings as well as hearing some of their beautiful traditional songs.

What conflict there is in the movie centres around the two youngest boys, Dude and Ugna, are sent to the nearest town to find a musician able to perform the Hoos ceremony to get the mother camel to accept its calf. Ugna is the true star of the film, a beautiful, happy, inquisitive child who overtakes Ivan from The Return and the young monk from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring as best cute little foreign kid at outshining all the adults in his movie. This is his first time outside the family’s isolated home, and his first encounter with such things as television, video games and ice cream. He is immediately enchanted by TV in a way which is hard for us to appreaciate, begging his parents to buy one suggesting it is only a matter of time before their lives too are overtaken by the West.

The Story of the Weeping Camel is what Davaa and co-director Luigi Falorni describe as a narrative documentary — a mix of documentary and drama with some scenes being true documentary with the camera and director being merely observers while others are re-enactments and are loosely directed. Since the likes of Michael Moore long ago did away with the idea of a documentary objectively capturing events as they truly occurred, it isn’t worth worrying about greatly especially when the results are as beautiful and as moving as this. This is a simple movie about people living a far simpler life than we can comprehend, but done so well that by the end of the film the life of a Gobi desert camel farmer will make more sense than any other life you could think of.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andrew Coulthurst on Thursday, January 6th, 2005. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.