Movies into Film

The Story of the Weeping Camel

Directed by Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni

Mongolia/Germany, 2004

Milk for Gall, or Mother versus Child

A shade of difference: The Story of the Weeping Camel (Photo: ThinkFilm)

Remote as the Gobi Desert may seem to Westerners, anyone who has suffered relations with a harsh and unloving parent will relate to The Story of the Weeping Camel, a documentary resonant with the innocent strangeness of fables.

The narrative unfolds in contemporary Mongolia, although the yurt-bound trappings of the nomadic herders whom we join root the atmosphere somewhere further back in time. The spoken language, the traditional dress, the four successive generations of a family living and working together, the folk tales the great-grandfather tells—all foster a sense of actions taking place centuries ago. I say join rather than observe. That’s how persuasively first-time feature filmmakers Byambasuren Davaa (a native Mongolian) and Luigi Falorni distill the essence of birthing camels and herding goats. Seeing the film for the second time, I felt that I wasn’t watching it so much as I was in it—just out of the frame.

The last of the pregnant camels—her fur is dark brown, and she has a beautiful russet fringe from her chin to her hooves—gives birth to a white colt. The mother rejects her child, hissing, snarling, snapping at the newborn, refusing even to nurse; and the little colt, who squawks like and resembles an enormous bird, grows afraid of his mother. One of the nomad women milks the camel and feeds the colt herself from a dipper.

That a camera captured any of this qualifies as reason to see the movie. Anthropology can be art, and the co-directors take the film to that level without resorting to irony or religious symbolism. In a scene near the very end, at twilight, the animals roam the parched earth as the camera pans the blue horizon of distant mountains; we hear the voices of the family singing inside one of the yurts, and I felt a bit of the spiritual quality that admirers of Bresson’s wooden Au Hasard Balthazar claim to feel at the climax of that film.

The family gathers: The Story of the Weeping Camel (Photo: ThinkFilm)

A word or two must be mentioned about a little scene-stealer named Ugna. The youngest son of the herder family, (I would place him at about 7 years old), Ugna clearly relishes being on-camera. There’s a glimpse of Ugna cradling a lamb in a moment that both sums up and suggests untold volumes about the young taking care of other young. Ugna insists on accompanying his older brother Dude on a camelback trek across the desert, and when they stop to rest along the way, Ugna, without any preliminary fuss, leaps from the saddle of a fully-grown camel—it’s a spectacular drop, yet the boy lands squarely on his feet.

In editor Anja Pohl’s most incisive cut, Ugna stands fascinated by television sets (“the glass images,” his great-grandfather calls them) in a hardware store, then we switch to the desert again (the film has been completely linear up to this point) where Botok, the white colt, lies on the ground waiting. His imperious mother enters the frame, and she growls at him, shuffles about menacingly. You wonder for a couple of seconds—will she attack him? How much does the mother hate this defenseless creature that looks nothing like her? Danger looms on both fronts, because the “glass images” threaten the rural Mongolians, too, as perniciously and insidiously as a physical assault. – NPT

July 8, 2004

Movies into Film

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