Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7955 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-11-01
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 87 minutes

Synopsis
Effortlessly blending drama, nature documentary, and ethnographic film, THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL weaves a magical tale about a nomadic Mongolian family who reunite a rejected baby camel with its mother. When a mother camel refuses to sustain her child, the keepers of the camels often reunite them in a ritual with folk music and chanting, the results of which elicit deep emotion--even causing the mother camel to weep real tears. Exploring more than just traditional ritual, this film speaks to the very nature of love--the baby camel cannot survive without his mother, just as no animal or person can.
Directors Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni drew upon the documentary style of Robert Flaherty (NANOOK OF THE NORTH), who recreated events to comprehensively portray his subjects. The pair tirelessly filmed spontaneous events for much of the mother-baby story, but chose to recreate certain moments in the family's daily life. A particularly humorous and insightful example involves a young boy who clearly feels conflicted between his family life and his desire for a more Western life. The film creates a contrast between the two, showing the boy listening to traditional fables in his family's tent, but then dreaming about owning a television. This spare film provides a visually enchanting and unique learning experience.

Customer Reviews

Charming (if artless) Mongolian documentary
The title of this documentary from Mongolia is not a metaphor - there is an actual weeping camel in the movie. Directed by a Mongolian woman and an Italian man who met as students at a German film school and set in the Mongolian steppe, the plot is slight and the directing style is somewhat artless, yet the story is charming and interesting. After a difficult delivery, a mother camel refuses to nurse her young. The camel owners (nomadic Mongolian shepherds, living in a ger in the steppe) send their two children to the city in order to get a violinist to convince the camel, through music, to feed her baby. And the movie allows us to see a particular civilization that is increasingly encroached by the modern world (one of the movie's most poignant scenes had the children demanding their father for a television).

Disappointing
This is a simple enough story. The footage is genuine - no CGI here. The story moves forward at a very slow pace and is subtitled although the dialogue is minimal. As an insight into another way of life it was certainly interesting. However, I purchased this based largely on reviews and recommendations on the Amazon site as well as others. I found it disappointing and feel that the other reviewers must have been in to camel husbandry or watching the film on fast forward. Unfortunately, I fail to see how this could get 5 stars.

A camel weeps to music as it reunites with it's calf!
Breath-taking cinema. This film's desolate landscape mirrors the harsh nomadic life of a Mongolian herder family successfully etching out a living 2000m above sea level. A richly crafted storyline beautifully juxtaposes a warm and fragile past with a poignantly cold westernised future. It achieves a perfect directorial feast of visual and auditory delights. How they managed to pull this off in such an unrelenting climate and in such a remote place is mind boggling which only serves to intensify this film's charm and sense of mystery.

Any pointless concerns about the apparent impossibilty of filming such events are tenderly dissolved by the camels own incredible tears. You simply couldn't make this up and that's the point. It's real and camels don't follow scripts. Ultimately this magical cinematic gem leaves you spellbound for all the right reasons. It's raw emotional content leads you to it's undeniably spiritual conclusions.

Watch it and let your soul feed on this profoundly lyrical tale of love.