Category: Mongolia

To Kill a Mongolian Horse (一匹白馬的熱夢, Jiang  Xiaoxuan, 2024)

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The Mongolian Steppe is known for its vastness and ever-extending horizon, but for Saina it’s shrinking to the extent that seems to be homing in on him and threatening to destroy the only environment in which he feels he belongs. Saina is himself often likened to a runaway horse, though he’s forever catching them and bringing them back, longing for a world in which he could exist within this natural environment just as his ancestors did but finding only futility everywhere.

Once a racer, Saina injured his shoulder and is now relegated to the sidelines while trying to find other ways to work. His father, a broken man who drinks and gambles, has already sold off most of his sheep and is on at Saina to sell the horses too. His friend Hasa has also sold up, first rejoining the circus but then declaring himself sick of being a herdsman. After getting injured he decides to try his luck in the city and ironically ends up getting a job working for the mining company that is quite literally disrupting the foundations of Saina’s life.

The main enemy is modernity, but it’s delivered by the Chinese. Saina finds himself surrounded by Mandarin speakers, while it’s a Chinese mining company that is gradually buying up the Steppe to open a mine and eventually tries to force Saina and his father off their land. Saina’s father keeps telling him a Chinese horse broker could get them a good deal, but he’s also told that his beautiful white horse isn’t worth very much because it’s Mongolian. It’s meat wouldn’t even be worth as much as a cow’s, though that’s the only reason the broker is interested in it.

Nevertheless, it’s largely for Chinese tourists that Saina is obliged to parade his culture. He takes part in Medieval Times-style dinner shows where the audience is repeatedly reminded they can buy drinks for their favourite riders and carrots for the horses, though the riders and horses almost certainly don’t see them. Saina rides dressed as a heroic Mongol warrior, but has dreams of himself dying on the battlefield alone with his white horse. His ex-wife Tana encounters something similar, as her Chinese boss makes her serve drinks at dinner parties with Chinese businessmen while insisting she sing a Mongolian song for the local colour. Later Saina gets a job at a ranch where city slickers come to experience life on the Steppe, but complains that the tourists ride the horses too hard and end up injuring them. They don’t have a connection to the land or know how to treat animals, while the ranch owners exploit the horses in the same way they exploit Saina, taking little interest in their physical wellbeing only their ability to work. At the show, Saina discovers his horse is injured and asks to switch to another one to let it rest, but encounters resistance in being told to get higher approval from the boss.

Meanwhile, he applies for a job at a fancy equestrian facility but is basically told he’s too he’s common for this elite, aristocratic Western sport that’s no longer about racing but fine technique. The snooty woman who interviews him says that Mongolian riders don’t ride properly and their skills aren’t needed somewhere like this. Saina could possibly start from the ground up as a stable boy but most of those are teenagers. Meanwhile Saina reflects that his father never actually taught him how to ride, he just placed him in the saddle and left the rest up to him with the natural consequence that it feels like something that is innate and essential. Yet he wonders if his son will ride at all or if these grasslands will still exist when he comes of age. Tana lives in the city and wants to send the boy to a school she thinks is better where they speak Mandarin and English while Saina is worried he’ll lose his Mongolian. When he puts him on a horse, the boy is terrified and asks to get off. All Saina really seems to want is to ride horses and raise sheep, but this way of life is dying out and the grasslands are shrinking all around him. There is something quite sad and defiant in his riding of his horse along a motorway in the juxtaposition between the traditional way of life and the modernity which all but destroyed it even as Saina is seemingly left with nowhere to go and no place to roam.

To Kill a Mongolian Horse screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Travesty (Гажуудал, Baatar Batsukh, 2024)

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“One man’s screams will not fix this social travesty,” according to an exasperated police officer sent in to quell a hostage crisis in a quiet rural town in Baatar Batsukh’s Mongolian crime drama. Led by chapter headings reading The Town, The City, the Nation, The State, the film pushes deeper towards the centre of corruption in an indifferent society in which the lives of citizens are barely valued and the authorities will do little to protect them. Indeed, the hostage taker’s claims that he will kill one person an hour seems to stand in for the slowly ticking time bomb of governmental indifference.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to Davaa whose teenage son keeps ringing him but he can’t help because he’s so far away on a case. His absent paternity seems to echo the ways in which the old have abandoned the young. The hostage taker turns out to be a young man who feels left out and hopeless. Rendered mute during his military service, he tried to sue the government but couldn’t while his mother, who worked for the government her whole life, ruined her health doing so and then was unfairly denied a loan to pay for medical treatment. The boy’s father appears to have been in the military, but is otherwise not around leaving him alone after his mother’s death having lost pretty much everything, which is why he takes revenge by holing up in the hospital with 20 hostages and asking 1 billion Mongolian tugrik a person. He’s clearly putting a price on a human life, but then so is the government when it declares I won’t pay.

The fact that it’s the hospital he takes over obviously has knock on consequences preventing local people from accessing health care, but the government does that too. As the doctor points out, rural hospitals are understaffed and under resourced. They can only offer basic services and send more seriously ill patients to the cities, but there aren’t enough beds there either so those like the hostage taker’s mother are sent back anyway. Meanwhile, a local crook’s ageing wife goes into labour with her fourth child which will earn them a medal from the government. The pregnancy is high risk and the doctor is worried about her because all of her previous births have involved complications which endangered the life of mother and child. But the woman insists she doesn’t care about the risks and is willing to die to get the medal from the government even though it appears they won’t care very much about her child after it’s born and fulfils their aim of expanding the population. 

Her husband is well known to the local police who’ve rounded up two other petty crooks who are listening intently to the unfolding crisis from their place in the cells. These middle-aged men, one of whom is a former nurse, don’t seem to have much to do except get into trouble. The police are doing their best, but like the hospital, they’re also under staffed and under resourced. A hostage crisis in their tiny town is an absurd development they have no idea how to deal with which is why Darvaa is dispatched to deal with it. The town can’t hope to raise the money the hostage taker is asking for, while the government could but it won’t pay despite Davaa’s please that they just give the hostage taker what he wants so he’ll stop executing people. When the authorities eventually turn up, it turns out they’ve lied. They didn’t bring the money and are planning to storm the building to end the crisis quickly without giving much thought to the hostages’ lives. Taken hostage himself, their representative grovels and pleads but refuses to offer the apology Davaa suggests as a last resort to appease the hostage taker with whom he has come to sympathise. 

A late twist makes the situation all the more tragic with the boy another victim of governmental indifference which would rather kill first and then refuse to answer any questions later. They try to fob Davaa off with a promotion in return for his silence, but he refuses while implying that he doesn’t really want to talk about this whole sorry affair either and would rather to get on with his job and looking after his family. In any case, the government representative seems more concerned that Davaa will embarrass him by exposing how he grovelled and begged for his life rather the fact they acted with callous disregard for the lives of the hostages and failed to take into account the fragile mental state of the hostage taker. The travesty is then not the hostage crisis but the state of the nation in which the citizens are themselves taken hostage by an indifferent and oppressive authority which extracts its ransom but offers little in return.

Travesty screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Silent City Driver (Чимээгүй хотын жолооч, Sengedorj Janchivdorj, 2024)

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Myagmar (Tuvshinbayar Amartuvshin) asks a teenage monk if he thinks atonement is possible. The monk, Sodoo, tells him that he thinks it is, but that it’s difficult and not many people can achieve it. The irony of Myagmar’s life is that he becomes a kind of ferryman, delivering the deceased to a kind of liberation he will never find while trapped in the eternal hell of Ulaanbaatar. Much less upbeat than his previous film, The Sales Girl, Sengedorj Janchivdorj’s melancholy character study finds its solitary hero consumed alternately by guilt and rage while trapped within a world of constant unfairness and inequality.

As Myagmar tries to explain, he’s not disabled, merely nervous though his stammer turns out to stem from extensive beatings during the 14 years he spent in “Dad’s house”, or prison, that have left him with brain damage and the melancholy stillness of one already dead. As he tells the friendly coffin maker at the funeral home where he is eventually employed as a hearse driver, he applied for countless other jobs but no one would give him one because of his criminal record and outsider status. Having lost his only living relative in his mother who died while he was inside, Myagmar lives alone with a pack of stray dogs that he’s taken in and cares for. He explains to the coffin maker’s daughter Saruul (Narantsetseg Ganbaatar) that some of them probably had families, but were abandoned because they got old or they were sick and it costs too much to care for a sick dog. Mostly though, they’re strays, like him, with no home or place to belong.

Myagmar extends this same kindness to Saruul having become captivated by her on seeing her come to collect her father from work. Coffin maker Sodnom thinks she’s a medical student, but Myagmar soon discovers that she works in the seedy underbelly of Ulaanbataar’s sex industry and is also at the centre of a political scandal involving a leaked tape of a politician said to have been uploaded by the woman herself as a last resort and means of revenge with a personal rather than political motivation. Myagmar follows Saruul around in a way which might seem creepy, but is emblematic of his shyness and lack of confidence in himself. Though Saruul eventually responds to his kindness and begins to return some of his affection, it’s largely because they recognise each other as two people who are trapped in this unending hell, he in his sense of futility and the trauma of his incarceration, and she within sex work and abuse. 

At a particularly low point, Saruul tells Myagmar that she wants to go to “that place”, the hell that haunts him though he no longer dreams. He tells her that it is not somewhere she wants to go, that there is no light there, no day and no night. It is a living death in which even his name was taken from him and replaced by a number, as Suruul’s will also be in a moment of grim irony. But all it seems to do is reinforce the fact that this is not so different from the life Saruul lives now. They already live in hell and there is only one means of escape. The monk, Sodoo, tells Myagmar that the best revenge is forgiveness and seeking vengeance won’t change anything, but he cannot overcome his sense of rage towards an unjust society. Still, Sodoo tells him that he did the right thing even if offers little sense of comfort to the melancholy hearse driver charged with transporting souls from this world to the next.

Sengedorj Janchivdorj lends the contemporary city a melancholy quality, a dark and lonely place peopled by the abandoned and downtrodden. Even Sodoo doesn’t quite know how old he is and marks his years by the day in which he was found. The more Myagmar begins to rebuild his life, the more he has to lose and the less it looks like he will be allowed to find happiness or the atonement he seeks for his crime. A gentle soul consumed by rage, he nevertheless has “capable hands” to which to entrust this justice and is capable of creating great beauty such as the stone lions he begins carving for the funeral home, but otherwise maintains a purgatorial existence unable to make a home for himself in a world of such constant cruelties.

Silent City Driver screens in Chicago 6th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

City of Wind (Сэр сэр салхи, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, 2023)

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Part way through Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s Mongolian drama City of Wind (Сэр сэр салхи), a young woman asks the hero if he’s ever felt as if he were split in two and there’s a part of him sitting somewhere else vaguely unfulfilled. It’s a feeling he might know all too well as he finds himself torn between the traditionalism of his upbringing and the pull towards the shiny consumerism of the modern city even as his school friend chuckles that he can’t wait to leave the country altogether.

The juxtaposition is evident even in the opening sequence as a figure in a shamanistic outfit referred to by others as “Grandpa Spirit” attempts to reassure an elderly man who fears that his time is near and that his son isn’t ready. The figure speaks with the ominously deep voice of an ancient deity while a young woman translates back and fore between a more archaic dialect and modern Mongolian though when the figure removes its headress the face the behind the mask is that of a teenage boy far too young to offer such rich life advice.

Now 17 and about to leave high school, Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene) is a top student only mocked a little by his classmates over his shamanistic side hustle while clearly a favourite of their ridiculously pompous teacher who is convinced he is a future saviour Mongolia. But despite the traditionalism of his homelife, Ze dreams of living in a fancy appartment in the city and frequently takes trips to wander around the shopping mall gazing at items he could never afford as if infected with an unstoppable consumerist virus. 

The irony is that the girl he fancies wants exactly what he has, a peaceful life in the country and the security of a family home her parents having spilt up and her father living abroad in Korea. He first meets Maralaa (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba) when her mother hires him to do a blessing before she has a risky heart operation. She brands him a conman and he’s hooked. Nevertheless, the more he associates with her the further he travels from steadiness of his spiritual practice. She dyes his hair which raises eyebrows at school and at home, and takes him to nightclubs in the city where the strobe lighting seems to cause him an existential confusion as if parts of himself were blinking in and out. He leaves abruptly and explains that he doesn’t think he should be there, it seems to have upset his spirit.

Little by little be begins to rebel, acting up at school and tempted away from his home but seems genuinely worried by the prospect that his spirit may really have abandoned him and that in crossing a line in his relationship with Maralaa he may have unwittingly made a choice that can’t be reversed. Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir deftly scans the changing nature of Mongolian society in panning over the somewhat rundown area in which Ze lives where yurts are mingled with more modern-looking bungalows and neighbours are treated as members of an extended family. A Soviet-era mural peers down at Maralaa and Ze as they overlook the city with its myriad high rise buildings and discuss their ironically contrasting dreams for past and future respectively.

Ze’s teacher views him as a future CEO who will one day save Mongolia through his economic acumen, though it seems like he may end up rebuilding the nation in a different, perhaps more literal way. Despite his adventures in modernity he comes to understand the value of his gift which lies in his ability to provide comfort to those around him along with a sense of continuity and spirituality that anchors them in their ever changing world. Suburban setting aside, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir captures a sense of beauty and serenity in the landscape through the snowcapped vistas that lie in front of Ze in the midst of his confusion as a young man torn in two, one looking toward the future with an irrepressible yearning, and the other towards the warmth and reassurance of the past while perhaps like his nation still floundering for balance and direction but always supported by the gentle love of those around him content to let him find his own way back to wherever it is he’s supposed to be.

City of Wind screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

If Only I Could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон, Zoljargal Purevdash, 2023)

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A teenage boy finds himself torn between his dreams for the future and the responsibility he bears towards his family in Zoljargal Purevdash’s gentle coming of age drama, If Only I could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон). Spoken by the hero’s younger brother, the title lays bare the children’s sense of despair as they gaze up at the giant hole around the chimney in their yurt longing for an escape from the cold while Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh) longs for an escape from this life by winning himself a place to study overseas. 

After his father’s death two year’s previously, Ulzii and his family moved to the city but still live in a yurt on its outskirts. Ulzii’s mother is recovering from a period of alcohol abuse and struggles to hold down a job while Ulzii has become responsible for his younger siblings. A new teacher (Batzorig Sukhbaatar) at his school notices that he is bright and has an aptitude for science, advising him to take special classes and enter local competitions with the aim of winning the national one which comes with a scholarship to an elite private school.

The sense of possibility begins to bring new light and focus into Ulzii’s life, but his hopes are quickly shot down by his mother who has decided to move back to the country. He wins the right to stay behind with two of his siblings but soon finds himself alone and desperate, unable to buy coal or food while his mother fails to send money. Earlier his mother had berated him for buying an expensive pair of trainers only for him to counter that he saved up for ages and bought them with his money from a part time job the rest of which he’d given to her. Ulzii spends anything he gets on coal for the family, taking very little for himself while trying to protect his siblings.

Some might find his dream naive, that his conviction that he can study his way out of poverty is unrealistic while his resentment also has a degree of of pettiness in his refusal to become what he describes as a “weak beggar”. In the yurt district people are always keen to help each other, but Ulzii is proud and finds help difficult to accept while he also feels belittled by his wealthy, apartment-dwelling aunt who soon turns nasty when he refuses to surrender a keepsake from his father. He is also at times cruel to his mother, insensitively revealing her illiteracy to his younger brother in an attempt to get him to stay in the city and go to school so he doesn’t end up like her. 

Ulzii’s mother is not someone suited to city life, though as it turns out the country doesn’t suit her so well either. Ulzii finds himself having to skip classes and take part in illegal logging to help support the family while his friends ask him to join them in committing a burglary on the home of rich friend of their father’s. Driving into the city to help an old man sell the last of his lamb, Ulzii is surrounded by protestors complaining about the air quality and suggesting perhaps that this kind of urbanity is literally wounding the land in contrast with the symbiotic lifestyles of the nomads like Ulzii and his family. Ulzii’s younger brother eventually becomes ill because of their inability to heat the yurt along with the poor air quality in the village while Ulzii cannot afford the money for his medicine. 

The kids just want an end to the winter and for their mother to come back so everything can go back to normal, but instead find themselves embracing a new family while trying to find signs of positivity for the future. Ulzii ends up rediscovering aspects of his culture in opening himself to the community and learning that it isn’t “weak” to accept help when you need it or to give it in return. There are no easy answers, and learning to forgive his mother for what he sees as her fecklessness may take a little longer but the siblings have at least begun to discover new ways to survive the winter that are filled with laugher and warmth rather than the coldness of resentment and futility.

If Only I Could Hibernate screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Harvest Moon (Эргэж ирэхгүй намар, Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam, 2022)

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A young man who left for the city is forced to reckon with his childhood self and the nature of paternity when called back to his rural home in Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam’s touching directorial debut Harvest Moon (Эргэж ирэхгүй намар). The melancholy title may hint at the short-lived nature of the central relationship but also reflects the slowly disappearing traditional culture of the Mongolian Steppe and the loneliness of those who find themselves in one way or another orphaned amid its vast and empty landscapes.

Tulgaa’s (Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam) dilemma is that he’s just received a voice message from a woman he’s been seeing explaining that she has a son she had not previously disclosed and wants to know if it’s a dealbreaker before the relationship becomes more serious. Meanwhile, he receives a call from his home village letting him know that the man who raised him, but was not actually his biological father, has been taken ill and may be close to death. Though reluctant, Tulgaa begins the long journey to say goodbye and then finds himself agreeing to stay a little longer to finish his father’s last harvest. 

While there, he meets a little boy, Tuntuulei (Tenuun-Erdene Garamkhand), who is like he was a child without a father though currently living with elderly grandparents while his mother works in the city. Older than his years, Tuntuulei too is bullied and ostracised by the other villagers who gossip and disapprove of the manner of his birth which apparently occurred after a one night stand. Neither Tulgaa nor Tuntuulei ever knew their biological fathers and are each looking for something to soothe their loneliness, eventually developing paternal relationship even in the knowledge that Tulgaa will return to the city once the harvest is done whether or not he eventually decides to accept becoming a father to his girlfriend’s son. 

In many ways Tulgaa is bonding with his childhood self and processing his paternal anxieties through the lonely, abandoned child he once was which is perhaps a little unfair given that he essentially taking a test run with Tuntuulei in preparation for becoming another boy’s father. Tuntuulei’s grandparents meanwhile contemplate sending him to the city to be with his mother, conscious that he’s bored with only the elderly couple for company and takes no interest in schooling. Tulgaa’s discovery that the boy cannot read provokes a rift between them in his insensitive reaction though Tuntuulei has already taught him a series of essential life skills for living on the Steppe from fishing to how to salve the blisters on his hands from cutting grass with a scythe. Tulgaa’s father had finally accepted that there was nothing he could have done to prevent him from leaving, but Tuntuulei seems so perfectly in tune with this landscape that it may not be possible for him to find happiness in the city even as this way of life continues to decline with other youngsters increasingly choosing urban civility over nomadic freedom.

As Tulgaa is eventually told, the age of harvesting by hand may be over as his stay in the village is quite literally cut short leaving Tuntuulei all alone a tiny figure amid heaps of drying grass. The once verdant field now seems sad and empty, a sign that autumn has arrived and not only for the two men but for the village as a whole. The film had opened with a group of men desperately trying to get a phone signal by attaching a mobile to a pole and standing on a horse, shouting up at the receiver and barely able to understand the reply. Tuntuulei suggests building tower so people could climb up and make a call whenever they want which in part symbolises his own desire for connection along with the community’s isolation from the outside world. But when he tries to use it himself he discovers only disappointment. After all this effort, his mother is too busy to speak to him and blithely asks that he call back later cruelly crushing his fantasy of being able to contact someone any time he wants and reinforcing his sense of aloneness. Even so through his relationship with Tulgaa who is after all an older version of himself he is able to find another connection which may endure even in its absence. Beautifully lensed to take advantage of the majesty of the Mongolian landscape, Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam’s poetic debut is a quietly affecting affair in its own way melancholy but also filled with warmth and a sense of future possibility.

Harvest Moon screens in Chicago Sept. 23 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema where Pinnacle Career Achievement honouree Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam is scheduled to attend the award ceremony before the film and Q&A after.  

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Cord of Life (脐带, Qiao Sixue, 2022)

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“The flowers of the Steppe can’t bloom forever,” an old woman explains somewhat cheerfully though not really knowing to whom she is speaking in Qiao Sixue’s deeply moving Mongolian drama, The Cord of Life (脐带). A young man struggles to find the balance between embracing his traditional culture and the desire for modernity, but begins to discover new direction after taking his elderly mother who is suffering with dementia back to the grasslands in search of the place she calls “home”.

Naranzug has several “homes” throughout the film though none of them are perhaps exactly what she means which maybe more a feeling than a physical location. In any case the first of them is the home of her eldest son, a flat in the city where they’ve installed a door with bars on it on her room to stop her wandering off. Apparently the neighbours have been complaining and it’s already led to a physical altercation which has serious financial implications for the family. Younger brother Alus (Yidar) has long been living in Beijing where he makes a living as a musician combining electronica with the Morin Khuur fiddle he learned to play as a child. When he’s called back to help, he’s shocked both by the progression of his mother’s condition, she no longer recognises him, and the way his brother and his wife treat her though as Naranzug later says herself they are quite clearly exhausted and are doing the best they can with the resources available to them. 

Alus particularly objected to the prison cell-style door and the practice of locking his mother up which seemed so undignified, though he later resorts to something similar himself in the titular cord, a literal rope that he uses to tie her to him so that she won’t get lost or injure herself. At one point he loops the rope around her waist and pulls her as if she were a stubborn cow unwilling to leave the paddock, coaxing her back inside the house with his music. Several times Naranzug is liked to a wandering animal who should be free upon the Steppe, firstly the lost cow but also a mother sheep to a lost lamb she later delivers to a paddock where she sings a folk song to encourage a ewe to feed it in a metaphorical allusion to her inability to recognise her own lost son who is also a lost lamb searching for his mother. 

She repeatedly asks Alus to take her “home” but he struggles to understand what she means because to him he already has, reminding her that their house on the Steppe is also “home” before realising that she pines for her childhood and long dead parents who lived by a long forgotten tree. The rope between them becomes a surrogate umbilical cord that allows them to an extent to reconnect as Alus becomes more familiar with life on the Steppe as its atmosphere pours into him in much the same way the sheep drank from the ewe or the farmer transferred fuel from one bike to another. “It shouldn’t all be Morin Khuur and throat singing” the comparatively traditionalist Tana encourages him, “we’re not living in the past”, giving him freedom and permission to embrace both the new in electronica and the traditional in the sounds of the plains. It’s not for no reason that Naranzug is always telling him to “listen”, for music is everywhere. 

Qiao Sixue’s roving camera captures a real sense of poignancy along with mysticism in the moving final scenes in which Alus must say farewell to his mother, letting her go or perhaps return to the embrace of others in the “home” that she was always seeking. She thanks him for returning her to this “happy place” of music, fire, and dance that seems like something from another time or perhaps out of time. As she reminds him, the river never stops flowing though the flowers on Steppe cannot bloom forever. Through a series of surreal adventures, mother and son begin to reconnect while Alus quite literally rediscovers his roots and then like the river keeps going moving forward under the Mongolian skies taking the past with him into a new future on a journey towards a new home.

The Cord of Life screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (Simplfied Chinese subtitles only)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSBBVLzSApc

The Sales Girl (Худалдагч охин, Janchivdorj Sengedorj, 2021)

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A shy young student of nuclear engineering’s horizons are broadened through her friendship with an eccentric old lady who runs a sex shop where she ends up working after being bamboozled into covering a classmate’s shifts in Janchivdorj Sengedorj’s charming coming-of-age dramedy The Sales Girl (Худалдагч охин, Khudaldagch ohin). Showing another side of contemporary Mongolia, Janchivdorj Sengedorj’s humorous tale turns on the unusual friendship that arises between the two women each in their own way lonely and looking for a kind of liberation from a sometimes hopeless existence. 

Saruul (Bayartsetseg Bayarjargal) is only studying nuclear engineering because her parents told her to and in truth would rather be an artist spending her evenings in her room crafting textured paintings rather than going out having fun. Her solitary air may be the reason she’s approached by another girl whom she hardly knows, Namuuna, who asks her to cover her shifts at work because she’s broken her leg slipping on a banana peel. Saruul is a little reluctant, unable to understand why Namuuna is being so secretive about the nature of her job anxious that she not tell anyone about where she works largely as we find out because it’s a sex shop run by an eccentric old lady whose cat she’s supposed to feed when she goes to drop off the day’s takings at her swanky new build townhouse. To begin with, Katya (Enkhtuul Oidovjamts) is gruff and unfriendly, somewhat unpleasant and intimidating yet something intrigues her about Saruul and gradually the two women begin to generate an awkward friendship. 

As if immediately picking up on her inner conflict, Katya scoffs “where will that get you?” when Saruul explains she’s studying nuclear engineering perhaps fairly suggesting that in terms of finding steady income there may not be much difference between a career as a painter and someone with a degree in such a specific subject. In any case, Saruul is largely unfazed by the nature of her work at the sex shop, taking it mainly in her stride though telling her parents only that she’s been helping out with “deliveries” of “medications” including “human organs” which fits in nicely with Katya’s life philosophy in which she runs a “pharmacy” that sells things to help unhappy people find fulfilment and the self-confidence to restart their lives. Somewhat sceptical, Saruul tries out her advice on her friend’s dog Bim which she’d always thought seemed a bit bored and lethargic, “not really like a dog at all”, feeding him a tab of viagra and then panicking when he disappears only to discover him out living his best life running with the local strays. 

Meanwhile under Katya’s influence she begins to open up too, getting a more fashionable haircut and dressing in a more individual fashion while embracing her sexuality in deciding to seduce her friend Tovdorj who is equally lost in contemporary Mongolian society where as he puts it you work all your life to get a small apartment and a Prius, planning to change his name to Jong-Su and become an actor only to be told he has “hollow, vapid eyes”. Saruul may be equally directionless but while fascinated by Katya’s sense of mystery, this elegant older woman with a Russian name who claims to have been a famous dancer but also at one point spent time in prison and now seems to be fabulously wealthy, she becomes disillusioned when presented with the dark sides of her work, almost arrested as a sex worker and then harassed by a creepy customer after unwisely agreeing to enter his home while attempting to deliver a package. As she points out, Katya is already quite divorced from “real life” and may struggle to understand the reality of Saruul’s existence living in a small apartment where her parents craft felt shoes to sell at the market after coming to the city when she was around 10 even though her father was once a teacher of Russian. 

Then again as Saruul comes to realise Katya has had a lot of sadness in her life and the wisdom she has to impart is sound if often eccentric meditating on the fact that happiness that comes late is in its own way sad because you no longer have the capacity to enjoy it to its fullest. Even so, she is doing her best to chase happiness and helping others, Saruul included, to do the same. Gradually, Saruul sheds her ubiquitous headphones which allow her to zone out into an internal disco complete with flashing coloured lights to become more herself with a little help from her fairy godmother, the ever elusive Katya. Quirky yet heartfelt, The Sales Girl sheds new light on the concerns of young people in Mongolia but finally allows the reserved heroine to free herself of her preconceived notions to live her life the way she wants a little more aware of the world around her. 

The Sales Girl screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Black Milk (Schwarze Milch, Uisenma Borchu, 2020)

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“She doesn’t offend on purpose, she doesn’t know the custom.” an awkward friend of the heroine of Uisenma Borchu’s Black Milk (Schwarze Milch) offers in her defence. “Then she doesn’t belong with us” comes the rather cold reply. Borchu’s semi-autobiographical drama, the director herself left Mongolia at the age of four and was raised in Germany, on one level explores a sense of cultural dislocation and yearning for wholeness but also uncovers the persistent othering of the female existence as the pair of estranged sisters struggle with their awkward bond and conflicting visions of womanhood only to find themselves finally united if in despair and heartbreak. 

Wessi (Uisenma Borchu) is perhaps so estranged from the culture of her birth that her German husband (Franz Rogowski), seemingly abusive, remarks that he’s not even sure her sister really exists and wishes she would “forget about Mongolia” angrily shutting off a record of a retro Mongolian hit. He tells her that she cannot leave, that she is a coward, and that in the end she belongs to him. Leave she does, however, returning to the Steppe apparently in search of something though it is not clear exactly what. In any case though her sister accepts her warmly the hospitality may in a sense be superficial of the kind on which the nomad way of life depends. As Ossi (Gunsmaa Tsogzol) later remarks, it’s bad luck to bar the door. 

Many things are bad luck for Ossi, chief among them harming animals as she explains to Wessi revealing that from time to time snakes do indeed slither inside the yurt. Nevertheless, she earns her living through farming, and despite the tenderness with which she treats a sheep wounded by a wolf, part of her survival depends on harming them. As we eventually witness the traditional methods of slaughter are quite literally visceral if less bloody than expected. Ossi gingerly rescues a fly drowning in her milk, yet in contrast city-raised Wessi appears much less sentimental about the concept of life and death or the natural confluence between the two. 

In this she is perhaps much more masculine than her sister, continually resentful of the overt patriarchy of the nomadic world which tells Ossi it is improper for a woman to tend to the slaughter and she must wait for her husband’s return. Yet Ossi resents her for her urban airs and graces, continuing to behave as a guest barely helping out, dressing in her Western fashions and even pausing in front of a mirror to ask which shade of lipstick suits her best in a clear indication of their differing views of idealised femininity. She rejects her tendency to superiority, claiming an agency that Wessi perhaps is still in search of in insisting that she doesn’t need her, or anyone else, to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do among her own people. 

Likewise, Wessi found herself crushed by a husband who appeared to be cruel and possessive while openly challenging Ossi’s apparently “lonely” marriage to a feckless man who spends his time drinking with other men leaving all the work to her. This may be, in a sense, a dereliction of duty in unwisely leaving his wife alone on the Steppe vulnerable to ill-intentioned passersby while obliged to offer them hospitality full in the knowledge they may take advantage of it. “I’ll kill you if you make trouble and don’t obey” just such an intruder later sneers having thrown Ossi out of her own home to attempt to assault her sister. Wessie meanwhile adopts the attitude of a woman possessed, spinning him a tale of terror pregnant with symbolism as she insists that her breasts run black with milk as if he’d pay for his misuse of her. Yet there’s something in her self-possessed control of her sexuality that alarms her sister, a dangerous transgression in a society defined by male power. 

As the film opens we see Wessi roughly taken by her boorish husband, facedown and impassive while he mounts her from behind ironically mirroring the actions of a rejected stallion among Ossi’s herd. Comparatively less inhibited, she makes no secret of her unfulfilled desire sharing her fantasies with her sometimes scandalised sister though her attraction to an older man Ossi describes as a “freak” and a loner eventually provokes a challenge to the social order, the potentiality of the relationship somehow a taboo even as he becomes a source of masculine strength otherwise turned to by women letdown by their own menfolk. Yet despite their differences the sisters eventually find solace in one another, the pregnant Ossi wrapping her blanket around them both as they look out alone at the desolate terrain, united in shared despair and the knowledge that mutual solidarity is perhaps all they have. 

Black Milk screened as part of the 2021 Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

I, the Sunshine (Би Нар, Janchivdorj Sengedorj, 2019)

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Childhood nostalgia and the changing Mongolian society come together in Janchivdorj Sengedorj’s triptych of warmhearted children’s stories, I, The Sunshine (Би Нар, Bi Nar). Set between the Steppe and the city and around 30 years apart, Janchivdorj Sengedorj’s three tales aren’t so much about idealising a traditional way of life or denigrating the increasingly digitised, modern society but emphasising that children are often resourceful and determined and above all mean well, while people are sunshine and have a duty to bring love to one another. 

Narrated by the hero of the final tale, Ideree (J. Irmuun), the first concerns his father, Bodi (U. Itgel), who grew up in a small village on the Steppe and later became an engineer because of the events he is about to convey to us though Ideree isn’t entirely sure he believes the stories his dad has told him. In any case, this one is about modernity coming to the village in the form of a television. Previously, the entire community had to cram into the back of a pickup truck and head to the Soum Centre to watch the latest instalment of the TV soap on which they are all hooked, but Bodi’s dad has returned from the city with a set of his own much to the consternation of his wife who feels he ought to have spent the money on a ger for his oldest son soon to return from the military. Unfortunately, however, no one has quite grasped how TV works and being set so low they can’t receive a signal. It being the summer holidays Bodi and his friends are determined to figure out how to get the TV working, firstly by asking their bored physics teacher who is busy with experiments of his own and sends them away with a diagram explaining how an antenna works, and then by pilfering all the metallic objects in their village including grandma’s big pan to build an amplifier. 

Though the tale takes place in, presumably, the 1980s, the kids are charmingly innocent not even knowing how to open the ring pull on a can of Pepsi and so excited to try it that they eventually bash a hole in the top with a nail. They are all desperate to leave the village for the bright lights and sophistication of the city but the older Bodi (B. Bayanmunkh) will later suggest sending his son back to the country to learn to be a real Mongolian man riding horses and herding sheep. Meanwhile, the village is in a mood of celebration as a former resident who graduated high school and went on to university is currently running for public office. It’s figuring out the TV problem that leads Bodi to want to become an engineer, certain that when you work hard at something it is possible to succeed. 

Meanwhile, Ideree’s mother Nandin (L. Shinezul) is reluctantly learning to become a contortionist with the circus in the city. Her childhood is less happy than Bodi’s mostly because her mother, formerly a contortionist herself, has encountered some kind of accident and now uses a wheelchair while her father has gone to the US in search of work and a possible cure. Having got her place because another girl was injured, Nandin struggles to get along with her new teammates while secretly reluctant to practice because the circus atmosphere reminds her of happier times. Nevertheless through interacting with the other girls and realising that her melancholy sense of abandonment has been mistaken she eventually rediscovers her calling as a contortionist instructing her son that not everyone is blessed with a natural talent but if you discover you have one it’s your duty to embrace it. 

Despite the twin lessons of his parents, however, young Ideree seems to be struggling. Bodi and Nandin (D. Asardari) are concerned that he seems to have no friends and spends all his time obsessively playing video games even though she is Facetiming someone on her iPhone as she cooks and he is working on his laptop at the breakfast table. At school everyone’s on their phones before the teacher comes in and the streets are filled with people staring at their screens. Running to school every day attempting to escape the gauntlet of older bullies on the bridge, Ideree’s life changes when his computer mouse comes to life and takes the form of a young girl (Michidmaa Tsatsralt) who can manipulate the world around him to silence his nagging parents, despatch his tormentors, and even make him a teacher’s pet but she can’t fix the fact he’s got no friends because friendship is born of the heart’s desire to connect and even the most powerful computers couldn’t forge that. Her advice? Bring love and sunshine. While perhaps criticising the alienation born of increasing digitalisation, Janchivdorj Sengedorj doesn’t exactly advocate a return to the ger even as he comes full circle with the family enjoying a traditional festival but does perhaps suggest that the world works best when people bring the love and the light. We don’t have to believe the stories, Ideree tells us, but he thinks that people start to live a completely different life when they forget childhood dreams and he just might have a point.  

I, the Sunshine streams in the US March 17 – 21 as part of the 12th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Three short trailers (no subtitles)