Tag: Mongolia

Black Milk (Schwarze Milch)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

West meets east quite literally in German-Mongolian production Black Milk, with its two characters named Wessi and Ossi. Wessi (Uisenma Borchu) lives in Germany, where she is in an abusive relationship with Franz (a very brief Franz Rogowski). Ossi (Gunsmaa Tsogzol) lives in the vast steppes of Mongolia in a yurt. They may share a mother and a language, but they have little else in common.

After a brief and slightly confusing prologue, Wessi returns to Mongolia, clashing with her sister and the wider culture in the process. Set against a gorgeous landscape of endless plains, deserts and wide skies, it is a heartfelt and deeply personal story that investigates themes of belonging, women’s liberation, and cultural identity with a surfeit of sensitivity.

Showing her background in documentary filmmaking, Borchu has a great eye for the customs of the region, showing us the food, gestures and superstitions that make Mongolia unique. This blurring of lines, focus on nomads and the lovely landscapes brings to mind the work of Chloe Zhao, although with a far more marked and European sense of sexuality.

Borchu plays herself, making it a particularly intimate film in the way it explores sex. Her character strikes up a relationship with the darker Terbish (Terbish Demberel) who represents the more traditional part of Mongolian culture. Tackling both colourism (his blackness is disparaged) and ageism (he is far older than her), this relationship provides the heart and central conflict of the film. This is especially true as we never really get an idea of why Wessi left in the first place, or as to what happened to their parents, or any idea of what Wessi’s life is even like in Germany. Everything remains in the moment, leaving it up to the audience to experience the film alongside its characters.

Despite a lot of sparring between the sisters — at one point Ossi says that Wessi can’t speak Mongolian properly — Black Milk is a lot subtler than the premise suggests. It doesn’t portray Germany as a feminist paradise or Mongolia as a patriarchal nightmare. Rather the film realises that good and bad men can found anywhere, but it’s up to women no matter where they are to speak up and find the right, caring kind of man for themselves. Employing a variety of animal-slaughtering metaphors, including the seemingly real portrayal of animal hearts being ripped out, Black Milk connects love to the landscape and to its animals, showing the difficulty of extricating one from the other.

While one moment in the middle — which should be earth-shattering but is never really referenced again — is a little confusing, and Franz Rogowski’s character is so thinly-drawn that it was probably better not to include him at all, this is a fairly successful second feature. Collapsing conventional expectations and expectations in favour of a nuanced sensuality, Borchu rarely compromises on her unique, cross-cultural perspective.

Black Milk plays as part of In Focus: New German Cinema at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November. It originally premiered at the Panorama section of the Berlinale.

All The Wild Horses

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Mongolia’s horse station system was used and expanded by Genghis Khan in the 12th century as the postal service vital to the sending and receiving of information from one part of his army to another. Such an efficient system it proved that it remained in use right up to the late 1940s. Its great resource was Mongolian wild horses. Unlike the Western training model where a horse is broken and moulded to the potential rider’s will, the Mongolian method leaves horses untamed so that when ridden they run with all their natural exuberance and energy as if in the wild.

Created in 2009, the Mongol Derby has seen a total of around 40 men and women from all corners of the globe compete in an annual 10 day long, 1 000 Km race passing through some 28 horse stations roughly 40 Km apart. When Ivo Marloh was accepted for the race, he decided to take along two cameras, using one of them himself. What follows is a series of sketches of real life characters both taking part in the event and organising it. Thus the documentary is a parade of competition hopefuls, organisers and other people who ensure the event runs smoothly.

There’s a huge element of chance and chaos in an event like this. Riders complete each 40 Km leg of the race on a different horse, picked at the station where that leg starts. Choose an unpredictable horse and it will buck and throw you off, possibly causing severe injury. Fall off near a wolf pack and you might get mauled to death. The rules don’t allow riding at night as such tragedies are a lot more likely to occur in the hours of darkness. Great emphasis is placed on the well-being of the horses with rigorous veterinary checks at each station to ensure competitor penalties for any horse not meeting stringent health standards.

The race has scarcely begun when one rider is thrown off and breaks his collarbone. Later on, another competitor is bucked and ‘faceplanted’. A medical team has to be sent in: he knows immediately he’s broken his neck and subsequent examination shows he’s broken four vertebrae.

Other potential hazards include pushing yourself too hard. We watch a woman determined to win at all costs keep going even as she succumbs to a bug that causes her to vomit three times a day. Eventually, she becomes so exhausted from intense heat that all she can do is dump herself and her horse down in a cool lake and phone for help. Since she’s passed the point when she can read numbers, she speed dials her father in the US who then relays her message to the organisers to come and find her.

Different motives drive different riders. An African – possibly the only black skinned human these horses have even seen – earns himself a reputation for handling the most difficult horses well. So at each station he finds himself given an ever tougher horse until, on the final day, he learns that his horse has never actually been ridden before. He rises to the challenge and seems to get a real kick out of bringing his animal safely to the final station.

Two Irish jockeys, an Englishwoman and another American woman who travel together and help each other when they run into difficulty also come off well here. And there is a hair-raising tale (and footage) of some riders having to ford a river at a point where it’s the best part of a mile wide.

Overall, this is an impressive little documentary even if it relies more on talking heads and anecdotes at the stations than on showing racing footage between them. Marloh, who also edited the piece, knows how to delineate characters and string together a good story. It’s a raw, exposed to the elements affair about an event I don’t believe has been previously seen on cinema screens. Well worth 90 minutes of your time.

All The Wild Horses is out in the UK on Friday, June 8th.