Good movies make life worth living. Have you been bored at home without anything new to watch? Why not try movies about Mongolia. You will feel the unoccupied open land and fresh air through your screen. We here at Wellspring Voyage are suggesting our travelers following movies to watch during your stay at home.
1. THE EAGLE HUNTRESS
The Eagle Huntress follows the story of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, as she attempts to become the first female eagle hunter to compete in the eagle festival at Ulgii, Mongolia, established in 1999. She belongs to a family of nomads who spend their summers in a yurt in the Altai Mountains and their winters in a house in town. The men in her family have been eagle hunters for seven generations, and she wants to follow in their footsteps.
With her father Nurgaiv's help, she learns how to train golden eagles, and then captures and trains her own eaglet. Although she faces some disbelief and opposition within the traditionally male sport, she becomes the first female to enter the competition at the annual Golden Eagle Festival. She ends up winning the competition, and her eaglet breaks a speed record in one of the events.
After the competition, she takes the final step toward becoming an eagle hunter by traveling with her father to the mountains in the winter to hunt foxes, braving snowy conditions and extreme cold. After some initial misses, her eaglet successfully kills its first fox and she returns home.
The film's dialog is in Kazakh; the narration is in English.
2. THE CAVE OF THE YELLOW DOG
The story is a gentle fable about the limitations of life and its acceptance. A girl learns the painful lesson of letting go of want and desire when her father insists on leaving her newfound stray dog. However, the ending of the film offers hope—another lesson of life being full of changes and the consequences of change may bring unexpected rewards.
3. KHADAK
Khadak is a 2006 Belgian/Dutch/German film directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth. The film is set in the steppes of Mongolia and takes place during winter in the latter half of the 20th century. It explores the events which concern Bagi, a nomadic herder, during his coming of age, and the forced relocation of his people. Bagi has epilepsy and is subject to fits which cause visions and out-of-body experiences. When local officials claim that disease is killing the livestock his family relies on Bagi and many others are forcibly relocated and made to work at an open-pit mine mining coal. Eventually, Bagi meets a woman, named Zolzaya, who participates in raids against the freight trains which transport coal away from the facility. As Bagi fights to overcome his epilepsy, together with Zolzaya he leads a group of young people who try to disrupt the mining operations and enliven the despondent populace to return to their nomadic lifestyle.
4. HORSE BOY
Based on the book of the same title The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son, The Horse Boy is a documentary feature film that follows the quest of Rupert Isaacson and his wife, Kristen Neff, to find healing for their autistic son, Rowan, after discovering that Rowan's condition appears to be improved by contact with horses. The family leaves their home in Texas on an arduous journey to Mongolia.
5. THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL
During Spring, a family of nomadic shepherds assists the births of their camel herd. The last camel to calve this season has protracted labor that persists for two days. With the assistance and intervention of the family, a rare white calf is born. This is the mother camel's first calving. Despite the efforts of the shepherds, the mother rejects the newborn, refusing it her milk and failing to establish a care-bond with it. To restore harmony between the mother and calf, the nomadic family calls upon the services of a group of lamas who perform a ritual with bread or dough 'effigies' (Standard Tibetan: torma) of the mother, the calf and the individual members of the family. The rite opens with the sound of a sacred conch shell horn followed by bells in the hands of lamas, some of whom wield vajra.
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