Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest international jaunt will take him to China, South Korea, and Mongolia. It is the first time that an Indian premier will visit Mongolia. Modi is scheduled to attend a series of meetings and cultural events in Ulaanbaatar on Sunday but visitors to the stunningly beautiful but relatively little-known Northeast Asian country know that its attractions lie beyond its capital. Two Mongolian movies and a documentary give us a glimpse of Mongolian pastoral culture, its challenging terrain, the influence of nature on the lives of its hardy people.

The Story of the Weeping Camel
Mongolian cinema hardly matches the volume of other Asian countries, but whatever comes out of the land-locked country every now and then is enough to demand attention. Mixing elements of documentary and fiction, The Story of the Weeping Camel is about the efforts of a nomadic shepherd family in the Gobi desert to rescue a camel calf that has been rejected by its mother.



The German-Mongolian co-production from 2003 wowed audiences when it was shown at the Osian’s-Cinefan Festival in Delhi in 2004. When the screening ended and the camels made an appearance in the credits, they received a whole-hearted round of applause. A charming ethnographic film that reveals the living methods, food habits, music and community rituals of the shepherds of the Gobi desert, The Story of the Weeping Camel is a full-blown two-hanky affair.

On the Move in Mongolia
Filmmaker and radio documentary producer Shabana Coelho’s On the Movie in Mongolia, a collection of series of portraits of Mongolian women, was made in 2007 and 2008. Coelho, who was on a Fulbright Fellowship, followed on the trail of nomadic families who live in the kind of landscape she had first seen in her geography textbooks, she says. The documentary comprises still photographs, video footage, sounds and audio interviews that give a glimpse of the everyday life of the horse riders and shepherds who live in Mongolia’s countryside. Coelhoa also visits Ulaanbaatar, known among the locals as “UB”, where she unearths Soviet Union-influenced architecture and Mongolian hip-hop. Coelha’s vivid commentary and her photographs bring to life both rural and urban aspects of a country that has little resonance among Indians except as the land of origin of Genghis (or Changez) Khan. There’s more on the project on the website www.storiesfromthesteppe.com.

Norjmaa
Screened at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2014, Norjmaa is the story of the eponymous heroine who lives all by herself in the kind of landscape that makes Ladakh look boring.



The love of Norjmaa’s lover has abandoned her, but she refuses to leave her remote hut even though the rest of her tribe moves on because of the threat of war. She recues two injured soldiers, one from Japan and the other from Russia, and spends the bulk of the movie keeping them from lunging at each other’s throats. The geographical gorgeousness and lead actress Badema’s spirited performance lend this Mongolian cinema curio considerable charm.