Ulaan Bataar

October 18th, 2006General3 comments

Mongolian steppes.

Recommended: The Story of the Weeping Camel

We recently saw a trailer for a film called Cave of the Yellow Dog made by a director named Byambasuren Davaa. This looked really interesting so I checked out her earlier film, Weeping Camel.

Synopsis: A Mongolian family lives in the Gobi desert, herding goats and camels. A white camel colt is born but its mother rejects it, so the family sends their two young sons to retrieve a violinist so they can enact a ritual to get the mother to accept her colt.

This is a wonderful, visually rich film that joins documentary filmmaking with a narrative — they shot a real family living on the steppes and the events of the camel’s birth, then later shot scenes to fill in a story that ties the real events together. The result is candid andcontains some really amazing visuals and details about life in a very alien place. It’s the kind of life whose simplicity definitely has its appeal.

I wish I had an evil minion — someone to wash my car and do my laundry in only the most evil of ways. Instead of using Armor-All he would use the salty tears of a cherub. Instead of Tide, ground up unicorn horn.

I’m aiming to have a smooth rest of the week — keep my head down, play the newly released Bully, drift into Seattle and ride on a DUCK. Drink beer, watch the sun go down.

I think in my next life I would like to be reincarnated as someone who rides a camel with big eye lashes.