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The Story Of The Weeping Camel [2004] | ![The Story Of The Weeping Camel [2004]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41PYNVG4K3L._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Directors: Byambasuren Davaa, Luigi Falorni
Actors: Janchiv Ayurzana, Chimed Ohin, Amgaabazar Gonson, Zeveljamz Nyam, Ikhbayar Amgaabazar
Studio: Ugc Films
Category: DVD
Buy New: £39.89
New (3) from £39.89
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 10747
Format: Pal, Widescreen
Language: English (Subtitled)
Rating: Universal, suitable for all
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 87 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.6 x 0.6
EAN: 5039036018555
ASIN: B0002W0Z6A
Theatrical Release Date: January 8, 2004
Release Date: November 1, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Ships from U.S.A., to anywhere in the United Kingdom! Orders only take 7-10 days! We specialise in service to the U.K. and only ship airmail.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 A mixed review November 11, 2008
kumoyuki
Here's the scoop. My wife & kids loved it and would certainly have given it 5 stars. And all of her friends & friends kids loved it as well. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I found it to be a relatively lame production, which tries to make up with an exotic atmosphere what it lacks in plot and character. I didn't hate it by any means, but it just didn't work for me.
Charming (if artless) Mongolian documentary August 22, 2008
Andres C. Salama (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The title of this documentary from Mongolia is not a metaphor - there is an actual weeping camel in the movie. Directed by a Mongolian woman and an Italian man who met as students at a German film school and set in the Mongolian steppe, the plot is slight and the directing style is somewhat artless, yet the story is charming and interesting. After a difficult delivery, a mother camel refuses to nurse her young. The camel owners (nomadic Mongolian shepherds, living in a ger in the steppe) send their two children to the city in order to get a violinist to convince the camel, through music, to feed her baby. And the movie allows us to see a particular civilization that is increasingly encroached by the modern world (one of the movie's most poignant scenes had the children demanding their father for a television).
 Disappointing July 10, 2008
Robert Hardie (Essex, UK)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a simple enough story. The footage is genuine - no CGI here. The story moves forward at a very slow pace and is subtitled although the dialogue is minimal. As an insight into another way of life it was certainly interesting. However, I purchased this based largely on reviews and recommendations on the Amazon site as well as others. I found it disappointing and feel that the other reviewers must have been in to camel husbandry or watching the film on fast forward. Unfortunately, I fail to see how this could get 5 stars.
 A camel weeps to music as it reunites with it's calf! April 1, 2008
Nilakantha (UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Breath-taking cinema. This film's desolate landscape mirrors the harsh nomadic life of a Mongolian herder family successfully etching out a living 2000m above sea level. A richly crafted storyline beautifully juxtaposes a warm and fragile past with a poignantly cold westernised future. It achieves a perfect directorial feast of visual and auditory delights. How they managed to pull this off in such an unrelenting climate and in such a remote place is mind boggling which only serves to intensify this film's charm and sense of mystery.
Any pointless concerns about the apparent impossibilty of filming such events are tenderly dissolved by the camels own incredible tears. You simply couldn't make this up and that's the point. It's real and camels don't follow scripts. Ultimately this magical cinematic gem leaves you spellbound for all the right reasons. It's raw emotional content leads you to it's undeniably spiritual conclusions.
Watch it and let your soul feed on this profoundly lyrical tale of love.
He is in the camel business & he is calling you "DUDE!" January 25, 2008
Mr. O. Buxton (Highgate, UK)
5 out of 14 found this review helpful
The back of the DVD case for "The Story of the Weeping Camel" contains a rather telling classification guide:
"Universal: Suitable for all.
Language: None.
Sex/Nudity: None.
Violence: Scene of animal being born [I kid you not].
Other: None."
This, I am afraid to say, rather neatly sums it up. There was hardly any dialogue. The "violence" (I've never heard the birth process being described as violence before, but still) was over within the first ten minutes. And otherwise: - well, "none" is pretty fair.
Now usually, I'm quite game for this sort of thing: Slow moving I can do (Tarkovsky's Solaris: check); German expressionism I can do (Werner Herzog: seen them all); moody nature/wilderness films set in Mongolia I can do (Derzu Uzala: check). The Mongolian hinterland fascinates me. But, all the same, this one had me snookered.
I mean, what is it? A documentary or a scripted feature? It seems to be a documentary, but it doesn't feel like one. (How did the German film crew know there was going to be a Rejected White Baby Camel ahead of time? What did the Mongolians make of the German film crew? Now *that* would have made for an interesting documentary.) Are we expected to believe that a bunch of guys from Munich with a steady-cam were just loafing around in Ulan Batoor and happened to catch this by chance? Was the Rejected White Baby Camel narrative a happy coincidence during a routine documentary they happened to be making about a family living a fairly boring life in the middle of nowhere? (Sample dialogue - "I think the last colt will not now be born today." "No. Perhaps Tomorrow." and "Come on! hurry up! Let's go!". But let's go *where*? You're in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Where is there to go? What's the hurry?). What on earth possessed them to go to Mongolia to make a film like that?
On the other hand, if it's a dramatic feature, where is the drama? The Mongolian family seems to be a well adjusted, harmonious, thoughtful, nice bunch of people (and they've called one of their kids DUDE!) But that's the problem: (perhaps out of some sort of cross-cultural respect) the film makers can't bring themselves to suggest any sort of imbalance in the family's way of life (apart from a grumpy camel). They feed the Rejected White Baby Camel by hand. They earnestly summon some sort of priest who lights some candles, make model camels out of clay and starts singing to them, I suppose on the off chance that this might help. But all the while the poor Rejected White Baby Camel is in reasonably caring hands (perhaps misguided from the point of view of animal husbandry).
So, other than to satisfy a vaguely voyeuristic need to see foreign people behaving eccentrically, what do we learn from this? The film never conveys the sense of scope to be a tragedy. The Rejected White Baby Camel is going to be okay. We are confident of that throughout.
So much so that by 40 minutes I had already started leafing through a magazine. Shortly afterwards the wife and I looked at each other, decided we'd seen enough, that we were happy enough to leave the Rejected White Baby Camel in the caring hands of these Mongolian folk: that it would pull through. We turned over to the news.
Olly Buxton
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