The Weeping Camel (Documentary)

Herald rating: * * * *

Just as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North took us into the snowbound life of the Inuit people around 80 years ago, this remarkable film captures the life of the nomadic camel shepherds on the remote Mongolian uplands.

In doing so, it practically invents a new genre of film-making - one that co-director Falorni has called a "narrative documentary". In contrast to practitioners of the "fly-on-the-wall" observational style, these film-makers knew the story they wanted to tell and went looking for it.

That story - common enough in real life - was to be about a camel (these are the two humped, llama-woolly Bactrian variety, not the undulating dromedaries) that rejects its calf. The hope was that it would later accept it but there was no guarantee of a happy ending.

The finished film bares scarcely a trace of the management it has been subjected to - including, as the makers willingly admit, some enacted sequences. It is a no-less-fascinating ethnography of a disappearing way of life because of those sequences and, though fans of the "natural" approach may find this disappointing, it has a satisfying and coherent dramatic shape.

Any criticism of the process can easily be stilled by imagining what Disney would have done with this. For all its narrative drive, the film has a leisurely, contemplative quality born of the film-makers' patience. A ceremony, accompanied by music, aimed at bringing mother camel and baby together, gives us a powerful sense of the community's vigour; by contrast, a visit to a nearby town by the family's youngsters underlines the vulnerability of the vanishing way of life. Very special.

DIRECTORS: Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
RATING: G
SCREENING: Lido