Way off the beaten track, so not Hollywood, the quasi-documentary film The Story Of The Weeping Camel takes us to the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia in the spring of 2002.
There we meet four generations in a family of camel and sheep herders who live in their yurts (ingeniously-designed, squat, conical-shaped homes), drink milk as a staple food and tend to their herds and flocks with a singular passion.
The simple yet elegant Mongolian-German co-production, which is being called "a narrative documentary" because it is scripted like a drama but populated with real people living their real lives, plays in Mongolian with English subtitles.
The drama in the piece revolves around a first-time mother, a domesticated Bactrian camel named Ingen Temee (Bactrians are the two-humpers in camel-land). When she gives birth to a white, oversized colt named Botok -- and we see it all up close -- she refuses to nurse him.
The family, brimming with compassion for their animals but also recognizing that their livelihood depends on a healthy herd, summons a musician to perform a ritual designed to put the recalcitrant female into a mothering mood.
Because the family lives in a remote corner of the harsh, bleak yet beautiful Gobi, two sons are dispatched to ride their camels far off to a town centre. There the musician can be found teaching traditional music to young people.
Other supplies, such as radio batteries, can be purchased there, too. The family at the heart of the story is poised between an ancient agrarian lifestyle and the modern commercial world, at least as modern as exists in an outpost where TVs are for sale but where few people have electricity to run them. Even this issue just exists and is not a source of cultural conflict.
By now you must realize that little happens in this film beyond the daily travails. If you are expecting Genghis Khan's ghost to come charging through on a medieval conquest, forget it. The Story Of The Weeping Camel is deliberately modest in scale and ethnographic in approach. The goal is obviously to give a slice-of-life portrait and it is successful.
Two of the people depicted are naturals with such charisma that your eye trains on them each time they appear. One is the bemused great-grandfather Janchiv (Janchiv Ayurzana) and the other the bright youngster Ugna (Uuganbaatar Ikhbayar) who accompanies his older brother on the cross-country camel ride to town. They help energize the film.
But it is important to see what else that the co-directors and co-writers -- Mongolian-born Byambasuren Davaa and Italian-born Luigi Falorni -- captured with their lens. The family depicted is utterly in its own space and time, and yet there is a universality to their existence that is remarkably obvious. The truths shown here about the shared human experience are as big as the story being told is small.
(This film is rated PG)
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