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March 20, 2007
What a delightful, engaging and complex film about living with animals. Filmakers Byambasuren Davaa (a Mongolian whose grandparents were nomads) and Luigi Falorni weave together fiction and nonfiction elements to tell the story not just of one two-humped Bactrian cmother camel and her abandoned colt, but of the nomadic way of life and its encounters with modernity (motorbikes, television electricity) and the fragility of families.
It reaches back to Robert Flaherty's classic documentaries---such as Nanook of the North and Man of Aran ---in the way that it traverses a narrow line between dramatic staging and the observation of real life that avoids National Geographic kitsch and reruns on the Nature Channel.
Story of the Weeping Camel conveys a sense of an indigenous nomadic culture whose relationship to the earth and to nature is shaped not by conquest but by collaboration, and a caring for animals. It is the strong unity of the family—and the animals are part of the family —that saves the young white camel from certain death. The weeping camel in the Mongolia's Gobi desert refers to a ritual that is performed by the nomadic shepherds any time a camel mother rejects her new-born: through music and singing the nomads find a way into the camel mother’s heart; in the end big tears come to her eyes, as she finally accepts her little white colt.
The compelling subtext of the film is the younger generation's real and inevitable embrace of modernity and a turning away of a nomadic life. Unga, the young boy, will probaby move to town to work in a factory making clothes designed by the fashion industry in Australia.
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I could look at that picture all day.