The Weeping Camel

Coming Out:

a Television



a Flock of Sheep



a D Volt Battery



After watching The Weeping Camel one comes to appreciate the people who inhabit that corner of the world. That corner of the world being the Gobi Desert, one appreciates the determination and can-do spirit that imbues the people who live there. The Weeping Camel in particular follows the life of some very rural inhabitants, one gets the feeling that even in Mongolia these guys live out in the preverbal "boonies". Alas the Mongolian desert dwellers seem a hardy bunch, living in a building that further research determined was a ger, a domicile used by the Mongolians since the times of Genghis Khan. Just by looking at the faces of the actors in the movie one can see the very near relation some of them must have to the men who ran the Mongolian Empire. Another intriguing aspect was the relative proximity that the family lives to their livestock, it appears that their assorted livestock (camels, sheep and goats) are their main source of income as when Dude goes into town his younger brother frames the price of a television in terms of number of sheep. The most surprising story theme of all is the relationship the rural family has with their camels. Their herd of camels seems to be of the upmost importance, both financially and spiritually as the story focuses around the efforts of the family to attempt to get a camel colt (like horses right?) to suckle on his mum who decided that she doesn't want her offspring to survive for whatever reason. The family (which is surprisingly multi-dimensional, with grandparents, parents and children all living in the same commune like environment) even sends their young children out to go get a muscian and what looks like some D volt batteries. The settlement seems a tad far away, but in the Gobi Desert who's going to bother a couple of youngsters out on a mission, kind of like the America of yesteryear. The purpose of their Lord of the Rings-esque quest is to get (besides batteries) a musician who will performs some sort of bonding ceremony between camel mum and calf. This musician guy comes out to the "sticks" on the back of a motorcycle, already making him one cool dude, he then performs a ceremony that at it's end the mother camel, who had rejected her offspring to accept her offspring as her own and allow the little camel to suckle. All in a days work for a motorcycling, music playing, camel bonding nomad. Oh and just as an aside, camels look a lot like tauntauns from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, just saying.

a Tauntaun