A Mongolian Tale

Mongolia's vast expanses and rolling hills. Human and spacial significance shrink when faced with their apparent infinity, and here other more natural units are used to measure the passing of time.Thirty years ago a motherless boy, Bayinbulag, was left with his father's foster mother, when the father had to leave for the city to try to find work. There is already an orphan girl, Somiya, living with ''gran''. The two children grow up together as brother and sister.Their days are spent doing the housework and tending the sheep and the evenings are spent listening, by the light of the carbide lamp to gran's stories and fairy-tales about the kingdom of grass. It is a life which appears at times to itself be a fairy-tale, as when gran and the children on a bitterly cold winter's night find a new-born stallion foal outside their tent, like a gift from the gods. They are proud of their black stallion Gangang Hara which becomes the apple of their eye. Childhood becomes youth. Buyinbulag has to follow his father's advice and leave the steppes to train to become a vet in the city, but he promises both gran and Somiya that he will return and marry Somiya. He is away much longer than he'd planned and when he returns, realizes that a serpent has been lurking in this paradise. A Mongolian Tale is the story of how friendship and love can turn into suffering and despair. It is a film about the realization that some ties are for life, and the acceptance that the life we are living needn't be the life we would choose to live. The director, Xie Fei, is a director from the ''fourth generation'', meaning that he is a director who was educated before closed the film school in Beijing, at the time of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The successful ''fifth generation'', lead by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, was the first batch of students to leave the film school after it opened again in 1978. There is already talk of a ''sixth generation'' of filmmakers, young independent filmmakers who concentrate on contemporary descriptions of urban youth culture including elements of sex and rock music; a generation with the massacre at Tienanmen Square in 1989 as a sort of common denominator and frame of reference. The director Xie Fei skillfully manages the ingredients of this unhappy love story. The magnificent scenery and emotional mood are balanced by the matter-of-fact, almost documentary, tone in the portrayal of everyday events and details. A balancing act which gives A Mongolian Tale a timeless, authentic feel. MS

Premiärstatus
Nordisk premiär: Orig. titel
hei ma: Medverkande
Narenhua, Tengger: Producent
Jin Jiwu & Du Yongling: Manus
Zhang Chengzhi: Foto
Fu Jingsheng: Musik
Tengger: Talat språk
English subs