The Weeping Camel offers a picture of everyday human life folded around the simplest of events. Unlike those documentaries that view tribal life as some ethnographically-coloured exotic creature that can best be understood by carving it up into a set of logical categories focused on daily rituals and practices, The Weeping Camel pivots its representation of a Mongolian tribe of camel herders dwelling in the spacious isolation of the Gobi desert, about a single event that is both unusual and dramatic: a mother camel’s refusal to suckle her newly-born colt. This dramatic pivot enables viewers both to understand and to feel the closeness of the relationship that exists between these tribal families and their camel herds. By eschewing the widespread documentary practice of positioning the audience as an observer, co-directors Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni have chosen instead to consciously collapse the distance between viewers and events. The relationship of a viewer to an organically unfolding event is not one that can be simply and unambiguously reduced to the separate, but linked elements, of viewer and viewed. Through a somewhat mysterious but common enough imaginative process, viewers find themselves becoming involved in a dramatic articulation of an event and experience an intimacy, an identity even, with those events that results in their hovering, as it were, somewhere between being an observer and a participant. This documentary’s focus on a mother camel’s rejection of her newly-born colt and the musical ceremony that is carried out to coax the estranged mother to bond with her colt, provides an uncomplicated but potent dramatic centre that enables Davaa and Falorni to communicate with unusual freshness a highly distinctive way of life.

There have been many documentaries that explore, and usually severely critique, those manifestations of cultural imperialism that grind down and destroy traditional patterns of culture and their environments. These documentaries focus on what we could loosely call ‘the drama of oppression’. The Weeping Camel creates an interesting counterpoint to these films. For example, I remember a scene at the conclusion of the musical ceremony that is organized to mystically and magically unite the mother camel with her helpless colt, where the musician and the grandfather stand up and one of them says, “Now its time for a cigarette". Having expressed this most modern of needs, and having placed factory-rolled cigarettes between their lips, they exit frame to enjoy a piece of Western civilization. Here the directors have not only resisted the tendency to position Western civilization as a cultural thug, (a view which no matter how valid it may be in many respects is fast becoming a fashion and therefore an over-simplistic and clichéd gesture), but they have also resisted the tendency to romanticize the realities of tribal life untouched by modern ways. Instead, they document the ancient and the traditional in the process of absorbing modern influences. This document provides us with a more unusual viewpoint, and one which promotes an awareness of traditional tribal culture in general, and of this tribal culture in particular, as something that is both vital and fragile: vital because it is still able to grow and absorb new influences, and fragile because, as an audience, many of us are aware that no tribal culture has survived its encounter with modern life. In this context, a film like The Weeping Camel tends to generate a range of meanings that transcend the immediate story about which it revolves, and produces the semiological equivalent of a bittersweet taste. It shows us the long arm of Western industry reaching into the Gobi desert, and yet it shows us a tribal culture still vital enough to absorb these influences and remain intact. And because of the filmmakers’ centre of interest the taste of this film is more sweet than bitter. I couldn’t help thinking that no matter how successful a culture is in selling itself to the rest of the world, cultural uniqueness will always assert itself. I have an American half-dollar coin which bears the inscription "E pluribus unum" (Out of the many, one). I think a documentary like The Weeping Camel shows that the opposite process is also at work and every bit as potent. That is, from out of one comes many: from out of one trunk come many branches, and out of one human nature come many different cultures always branching out in new and unsuspected directions. Or put differently: in contrast to those documentaries which alert us to the portents of doom, The Weeping Camel strikes an authentically and profoundly optimistic note that makes me think that the wrinkle of human idiosyncrasy has never been, and will never be, in any age, completely ironed out.