Directors Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa of "The Story of the Weeping Camel" were awarded Sunday with best direction of a documentary at the 57th annual Directors Guild of America Awards, an honor known to predict consequent Oscar winners.
The film, which also won the East Lansing Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary last year, will be showing at 7:30 p.m. today at the Hannah Community Center, 819 Abbott Road, and 7 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. Friday through Sunday at Wells Hall.
Filmed in Southern Mongolia's Gobi Desert, "The Story of the Weeping Camel" follows a family of herders who must find a way to save a rare white calf rejected by its mother after a difficult two-day birth. Since the infant camel is not receiving milk and therefore could die, the family enlists two young boys to travel to neighboring town to fetch a musician for an ancient birthing ritual.
Falorni and Davaa already had a script in mind when they met the family documented in this film, so there are certain moments where the footage seems manipulated, or unreal. However, viewers should keep in mind that the particular story they captured, that of this difficult birth, was completely unplanned.
Nevertheless, this isn't a documentary everyone will immediately enjoy, particularly those squeamish about live births. Viewers can expect to see animal labor directly through footage of the partially delivered colt, as well as the mother's distressed lowing - imagine how a camel might yell - of the mother.
What such direction and editing reveals, of course, is the realism necessary to propel this film. While watching a documentary like this, you have to pretend cameras are not visible to the "actors," and people do not act different because they are being filmed. Scenes where the focus is on the camel herd, and not the herders, allow the directors to better maintain this sense of nonintervention.
The deliberate shots of herder Odgoo (Odgerel Ayusch) comforting her small child Guntee (Guntbaatar Ikhbayar) also create a bittersweet juxtaposition to the complete neglect between child and mother camel. Where Odgoo soothes a crying Guntee, the mother camel kicks and bites her own child to prevent him from obtaining milk.
Accompanying these scenes are always the sound of human and animal conversation simultaneously, within an amazingly quiet desert - while the family tells stories in their tent before they sleep, you can hear the moans, barks and baas of the animals outside. With every such sound and shot, "The Story of the Weeping Camel" shows, ultimately, how similar emotional responses between humans and animals are, and what lengths we all take to reconcile.
