The sorrows of young Botok began when he was half-born. His mother, a regal dromedary named Ingen Temee - who is also the star and title character in The Story of the Weeping Camel - got fed up during the last stages of a difficult labour; she simply stood up and strolled away, with Botok's head and hooves still bobbing uncertainly outside mum's body.
After the birth, Ingen Temee refused to suckle or bond with her bewildered colt, whose heart-punching cries of hunger and desolation rippled and faded against the Gobi Desert winds.
Co-directors Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni knew a little of anguish and frustration themselves during the making of Weeping Camel. In order to make the film they had in mind, the directors had to bank first on the estrangement of Ingen Temee and Botok, and then on their eventual reunion - an anxious prospect, since, as Falorni notes dryly, "we found it is impossible to direct a camel". The story originated with Davaa's memories of a short educational film she saw as a child growing up in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, in which camel-herders reconcile a troubled parent-baby relationship through an ancient musical ritual that moves the mother camel to tears.
Davaa, a city kid whose grandparents were nomads, and the Italian-born Falorni met at the Munich film school, where they imagined what Falorni describes as "a story that would lead to this ritual, and would also show the nomads' encounter and confrontation with modernity. This was something we thought of in Munich at a writing desk, not out in the desert." After two weeks and 4,000km of travel in Gobi, they found the perfect family to channel this folkloric tale: four generations living together in one camp, including wise-and-wizened oldsters, young parents with movie-star looks and effortless grace, and three appealing children. "We fell in love with them all immediately. They were beyond our wildest expectations."
The family tended 300 sheep and goats and 60 camels; Botok, unusual for his snowy-white coat, arrived last in the camel-birthing season. "There were 20 births in all, and our hope - although 'hope' might be the wrong way of putting it - was that one of the 20 would be rejected," Falorni says. "Without the rejection, there was no story." The movie team pitched their yurts (Mongolian tents) about one kilometre away from the household. "We were at the end of nowhere," says Tobias Siebert, producer of Weeping Camel. "It was a four-hour drive from the nearest city. We didn't have a shower. It was a bit like being on a small boat - we were surrounded by endless space but had to pack together in one tiny little place, so it was important that everyone got along. In 24 hours we'd have temperatures that would go from minus 20°C to 20°C, and sandstorms." Despite the climatic complications, Davaa and Falorni eschewed digital video for 16mm celluloid, and no trace of the stresses of production can be detected in the impeccably beautiful compositions.
The filmmakers slept in shifts in order not to miss anything - such as the extraordinary dancing scene between the mother camel and her son. "That was the most astonishing part of the shoot," Siebert says. "We would have shot longer but we ran out of film - the few minutes you see is the first to the last bit of material we had. It was as if we'd choreographed it." Falorni cites the inspiration and influence of pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty, whose landmark film Nanook of the North (1922) recorded the often sensational everyday lives of an Eskimo tribe. Famously, Flaherty didn't always stick with events he could readily observe: the movie's walrus and seal hunts were staged for his cameras, and Nanook's "igloo" was essentially a set, expressly constructed for the film (and lacking a roof). Weeping Camel also inhabits an intriguing space between fiction and nonfiction.
"It's mainly a documentary, but with some re-enacted scenes - we refer to it as a 'narrative documentary'," Falorni explains. "We did have a script, but we adjusted it to fit the family. If we missed something, we would ask the family to repeat it for us; or if something important were about to be discussed, we might ask them to wait for us to set up. We never asked them to do something they normally wouldn't do. It was more like, 'At lunchtime, could you repeat this conversation so the audience will know what's going on - but in your own words?' We wanted a collaboration." Davaa, who of course knows the language and culture, adds, "I never told them what they had to do; everyone has their own creativity within them. It was up to me to extract that creativity."
Weeping Camel documents a way of life that may be on the verge of vanishing, due in part to climate change. In southern Mongolia, the winters have been getting colder and the summers hotter, with barely a springtime buffer zone. "We were lucky to find this family intact, because that winter had been particularly tough. Many families had split into smaller units in order to use the grass better for their animals," Falorni says.
The siren call of the cities also beckons to herders - with varying success, as Weeping Camel demonstrates, when the two older children make the long, camel-bound journey to the nearest town to find a violinist for the reunion ceremony. Guntee (Guntbaatar Ikhbayar), a wide-eyed little lad, gapes at the omnipresent television sets and motorcycles and gobbles an exotic ice-cream cone, but his elder brother (Enkhbulgan Ikhbayar), a laconic Eastwood type called Dude, remains coolly unimpressed (he's been to boarding school, after all).
"Many, many families have left the desert," Falorni says. "This has been happening for the last 15 years, since the fall of communism in the USSR. The new government encouraged herders to come to the urban areas and live a more modernised life. It was often an illusory goal - some people have made it, but others who sold up couldn't find jobs and ended up on the street. I think nowadays people think twice before they sell their land and animals and move to the city.
"But there is still a huge attraction," Falorni continues. "The kids can go to school, be exposed to fast food, video games, films, TV. Even the yurts have satellite dishes now. On the other hand, the nomadic culture is based on such strong and healthy values, they won't let themselves be wiped away easily. They will have to integrate TV and cars and so forth into their lives, but they'll do it in their own way. Their culture may change, but it won't disappear."