The Eagle Huntress

Makpal Abdrazakova and her eagle, 2010, Kazakhstan

Director Otto Bell with Aisholpan

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS                B                    

Great Britain  USA  Mongolia  (87 mi)  2016  d:  Otto Bell           Official Website

If one purpose of a documentary film is to take viewers to a time and place that is completely foreign to them, then this film succeeds beyond belief, a film that takes us to the desolate landscape of the Mongolian mountains and plains through some treacherous wintry conditions, including limited sunlight, reduced to just two hours each day in the harshest conditions when temperatures reach 50 degrees below zero, with utterly spectacular aerial photography by Simon Niblett.  Capturing the magnificent vantage point of eagles in flight, shooting from hundreds of yards away, the cameras capture the aerial sweep of the birds in flight, flying at speeds of 180 miles per hour, yet they remain in sharp focus throughout.  In keeping with customs handed down by Kazakh families for centuries, the film’s storyline follows the exploits of Aisholpan Nurgaiv, a 13-year-old girl, as her father trains her to become the first woman in her family’s twelve generations of eagle hunters.  When the Soviet Union ruled Kazakhstan, many families fled to Mongolia, where Bayan-Ölgii is the westernmost Mongolian province containing the country's only Muslim and Kazakh majority, with Kazakhs comprising 93% of the population, where many families continue to hunt with golden eagles, targeting foxes and hare in the cold winter months when they are more easily seen against the white snowy backdrop, where the eagle’s acute eyesight, sharp talons, predatory instincts, and ability to navigate vast distances make them ideal hunters.  There are an estimated 250 eagle hunters in Western Mongolia.  Every year in the first week in October, the Kazakhs hold the annual Golden Eagle Festival of Mongolia, where 70 eagle hunters vie for the top prize, mounted on groomed and decorated horses, wearing traditional Kazakh hunting attire, where prizes are awarded for speed, agility and accuracy, as well as for the best traditional Kazakh dress.  In addition, there is a smaller festival held in the last week of September called the Altai Kazakh Eagle Festival with about forty eagle hunters participating.  Although the Kazakh government has made efforts to lure the practitioners of these Kazakh traditions back to Kazakhstan, most Kazakhs have remained in Mongolia. 

In 2013, Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky spent 40 days photographing Kazakh families in Mongolia, where he sought out a girl to round out his personal vision of “the future of eagle hunting.”  With the help of his guide Dauit Daukysh Ryskhan, Svidensky discovered Aisholpan Nurgaiv, the 13-year-old daughter of the eagle hunter Agalai Nurgaiv, with the BBC publishing a photo-essay in 2014 that captured the attention of the filmmaker, who flew to Mongolia to secure the rights to Aisholpan’s story.  As fate would have it, her father welcomed the idea, as we learn that Aisholpan’s older brother joined the army in 2011, so his daughter was next in line to pass down the ancient tradition, showing outward enthusiasm about the idea, inviting the film crew to accompany them that afternoon when he and his daughter were planning a trip to the Altai mountains to capture a young eaglet of her own to train.  One of the extraordinary sequences of the film has Aisholpan being lowered by a rope from a steep rocky cliff in temperatures hovering around zero as she drops in on an eagle nest as she attempts to snare a female eaglet (larger, fiercer, and more powerful than males) that is continuously evading her grasp while the mother eagle circles overhead.  There’s a short window to perform this nifty trick, as the idea is to arrive just a day or two before the young 3-month old eagle is ready to fly.  It’s a heart-stopping sequence, similar to that filmed by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Icelandic film Heartstone (Hjartasteinn) (2016), where a young boy is lowered over a cliff edge to pick wild bird eggs from their nests.  Interesting that the scene is associated with machismo and masculinity in the Icelandic film, while the dare-devil maneuver seems effortless by this brave young girl, capturing a healthy young eagle named Ak Kanat, “White Wings.”  Eventually making seven trips to Mongolia, the filmmakers capture months of training where according to her father, Aisholpan displays a natural ease when handling the animal, weighing up to 12 pounds, where a baldak, or Y-shaped wooden rest, is attached to the saddle to carry the eagle on horseback, as the eagle learns to fly great distances from her father’s arm to her own, each wearing a heavy protective glove, coming when called, recognizing Aisholpan’s distinct voice, Clip: The Eagle Huntress (1:31).  According to tradition, after seven years, the eagles are released back into the wild where they are free to mate and raise their young.  

The film actually opens with a ceremonial release of a prized eagle, leaving it a newly slaughtered sheep initially to feed on, where the viewer is drawn into the customary tradition of eagle hunters in the region.  Mostly handed down from father to son, this one offers a unique twist, becoming a father and daughter story that breaks with male tradition.  Aisholpan spends the week attending school in town, living in a dormitory with her two siblings, where she is a straight-A student with aspirations to become a doctor, returning home on the weekends to train her animal.  She has six weeks of training before the Golden Eagle Festival, where her father is one of the notorious figures and personalities associated with the festival, having already won twice, where he is one of the most respected elders.  In his eyes, girls can do anything boys can do, as long as they remain determined, “There is no gender discrimination when it comes to hunting with eagles…Aisholpan is a very brave girl.”  But other elderly eagle hunters are more doubtful, claiming “women are weaker and more fragile,” where they’ll get “too cold” on the hunt, or “she’ll have to get married soon anyway!”  These chauvinistic scoffs only make Aisholpan more determined to prove herself at the festival, where she is not only the lone female among the 70 participants, but also the youngest entrant, with both her father and grandfather supporting her.  Her mother laments the fact she doesn’t get to spend enough time with her daughter, but realizes the significance of her daughter’s ambitions and supports her whole-heartedly.  Evaluated for their hunting attire and the quality of their horses, the eagles are timed for their speed in swooping down from mountain tops to their handlers calling out for them below with their arms upraised, or their ability to catch prey using a dead rabbit tied to a fast-moving rope.  It’s an extraordinary event, where footage of the eagles in flight offer awe-inspiring cinematography, much of it filmed in slow motion, with Aisholpan having to prove herself in each competition, with grumbling male onlookers having to eat their words.  Even as she surpasses all expectations, they still believe a true test of skill comes with the bone-chilling hunts of winter where the girl has yet to prove herself by catching a fox.  The final trek into the snowy mountains in the 50-degree below zero winter chill is a brutal test, not just for Aisholpan but for her eagle, who has never killed a live animal before, especially one that fights back with deadly force.  In a 20-day hunt, with only two-hours of sunlight every day, where at times the snow is too deep for the horses, it’s an astonishing feat, where the eagle fails in its first attempts, outfoxed by a fox, but they persevere until they are eventually successful, where the degree of difficulty is truly the ultimate test of stamina and skill. 

So there are two diametrically opposing forces at work here, a revelation about a unique Mongolian tradition that is cinematically spectacular, and a willfully exploitive depiction of a young girl from the outer edges of the world whose ambitions are blatantly manipulated to serve the director’s single-minded purpose, becoming a manifesto on girlpower, where the filmmakers resort to a bit of contrived overkill in the trite narration and commercial musical refrain “You can do anything” from Sia’s “Angel by the Wings” that plays over the closing credits.  While Aisholpan’s infectious smile and fearless approach make her an ideal subject, she is not, as the film erroneously suggests, the first female eagle huntress, and to suggest so is to express a knowingly inaccurate narrative.  According to Adrienne Mayor’s extensive historical overview, May 1, 2016 (pdf format), The Eagle Huntress Ancient Traditions and New Generations, “eagle huntresses were probably more common in ancient times…Archaeological discoveries of graves (ca 700 BC to AD 300) across ancient Scythia, from Ukraine to China, reveals that steppe nomad females engaged in the same riding and hunting activities as the men, and about one third of the women were active warriors in battle.”  Unfortunately, the director is well aware of previous female eagle hunters, but intentionally left them out of the narrative and instead created a feel-good story of a young girl breaking the mold and overcoming all odds, becoming a heartwarming tale that is primarily suited to appeal to Western audiences, but is blatantly untrue.  Consider this article written by Shamil Zhumatov from March 6, 2012, Kazakhstan's lone female eagle hunter - Reuters, profiling another eagle huntress, Makpal Abdrazakova, who was first seen competing in 2009 and is now a lawyer and continues to enter eagle contests, encouraging other young women, while her father, Murat Abdrazakov, also continues to train new young girls.  According to Mayor, the director refused to meet Makpal when making his film, and when asked why he indicated “it is not his responsibility to tell an ethnologically comprehensive story,” while co-producer Asher Svidensky informed her in early 2016, “Entertainment isn’t anthropology.”  Instead the filmmakers intentionally misrepresent Kazakh and Mongolian culture, showcasing well-decked out elders in animal furs from the Kazakh community who refuse to acknowledge a woman’s place in their hunting customs and traditions, claiming women belong in the kitchen (male views like this exist in every society), all belittling and undermining Aisholpan’s accomplishments, yet Mongolia is far from the backwards or misogynistic culture presented, as women have voted and held office since 1924, more than 80 percent of women have secondary education, and 70 percent of college students are women, where the historical independence of women since ancient times is worthy of note.  Strong women have always been part of the nomad heritage and girls have never been forbidden to train eagles.  Girls and boys start riding horses at age five and help with herds, as the challenging conditions of the brutally harsh landscape has always meant that men and women engage in strenuous riding activities together.  From the days of Robert Flaherty to Werner Herzog, documentary films are expected to be culturally honest and historically factual, even if some obvious staging exists in the film.  Unfortunately, this film skews the facts to create an overly determined film, whose goal is known before the film even starts, becoming one of those films that makes the subject matter fit the theme, regardless of contradictory evidence, only including what meets the predetermined criteria and leaving out the rest.  

Home  Nena Atkinson from Women of Mongolia, New Media Research Exhibition, Summer 2015  

Heartstone (Hjartasteinn)

 


Director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson

HEARTSTONE (Hjartasteinn)                  B                    

Iceland  Denmark  (129 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson  

Official Website

A rather sprawling first-time feature film by a young Icelandic director, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson, winner of the Q Award for Best Gay, LGBT-themed film, who previously made a series of award winning shorts, including ÁRTÚN, which won the Best Narrative short film at the Chicago Film Festival in 2014, focusing this time on the relationship of two 14-year old boys that have been friends since an early age, the more diminutive Thor (Baldur Einarsson), whose father is absent, the runt of the litter living at home with a single mother and two older sisters, and the taller Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), who is living with a physically abusive father.  No easy life for either of them, as the film provides intimate details about their lives growing up in a remote fishing village in Iceland.  Much of it spent outdoors in the rolling hills next to the sea, the boys are part of a generational hierarchy led by an older boy, Ginger (Sveinn Sigurbjörnsson), who is little more than a bully, running around with a group of enforcers where he continually picks on boys younger than him.  In an opening moment he can be seen shooting birds for the sheer pleasure of it, leaving them to rot afterwards.  This act is paralleled by another scene with the two boys hanging with a group their own age, where they are singling out a certain fish, bullrouts, calling them ugly, and then stomping them to death, creating a pervasive mood of meaningless aggression.  These seemingly tiny acts are contrasted by the largesse of the Icelandic landscape, beautifully captured by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, as looming out the window or off in the distance is a unique mix of mountains meeting the sea, where the harshness of the land seems to mirror the temperament of the older men, who tend to be stubborn, gruff, and at times painfully cruel.  No one represents this more than Kristján’s abusive father, Sigurdur (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson), who terrorizes his wife and family, where his mean streak is a sign of his masculinity, in his eyes, as nothing ever comes easy, where you have to work your fingers to the bone just to survive this heartless world.  

Thor and Kristján have it different, as they have each other’s backs and have been best friends forever, where if you ever see one of them, the other is likely to be with him, as they are an inseparable pair, spending all their time together.  Their parents don’t seem to mind, as that’s less they have to look after, as the boys can seemingly take care of themselves, always off on some adventure, heading for the hills and faraway corners of the region, idly exploring something around town, hanging out with others, chasing after farm animals, or just generally following their curiosity, where they have plenty of time to talk about anything at all.  At home, Thor is surrounded by the presence of strong women, something he can’t fully appreciate, as his older sister Hafdís (Rán Ragnarsdóttir) recites dark and melancholic poetry at morning breakfast, where the more outspoken middle sister Rakel (Jónína Þórdís Karlsdóttir) tells her to just shoot herself already and get it over with.  All three gang up on their mother Hulda (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir) when she has designs on a man, as the general consensus is she’s better off without them, but if truth be told, they don’t get a vote.  Hulda remains young and attractive, especially for the region, where one of the neighbors, Sven (Søren Malling), has a thing for her, handing Thor a necklace to give to his mother, something he wouldn’t be caught dead doing, instead giving it to his own girlfriend Beta (Diljá Valsdóttir) as a sign of going steady, while her less attractive girlfriend Hanna (Katla Njálsdóttir) has designs on Kristján, but only because she thinks she’s supposed to, as there’s no real chemistry between them.  Nonetheless they constantly double date, have their first kiss, spend time alone, even try sex, with Beta kind of pushing the action with Thor, which he willingly follows, while Kristján, who is tall and attractive, does his best not to be impolite to Hanna.

The interest in the girls eventually changes the dynamic between both boys, especially when Kristján playfully plants a kiss on Thor’s mouth, trying to pretend that it’s meaningless, a harmless joke, but it’s clear there’s more behind it, sending both into a tailspin of avoidance, where a mysterious gulf comes between them, neither one able to verbalize what they’re thinking, where a cloud continues to silently hang over both of them.  As if to test their mettle, Sigurdur decides to take these boys on an ominous mission, hiking quite a ways before they reach the edge of a steep cliff, where one boy will be lowered by rope on a harness to collect eggs from the vertical sea stacks, that appear like high-rise apartments stacked up on top of one another in the high cliffs rising out of the sea, with thousands of swarming birds living in the cracks on the rocks, a dangerous and life-threatening mission for men at any age, but for boys, it foolishly and deliberately risks their lives, with Sigurdur asking Thor to take the trek, almost as if that’s one way to get rid of him.  While it’s spectacular imagery, anyone who’s ever witnessed one of these bird sanctuaries realizes how foolhardy this must be, but if anything, it only brings the two boys closer together afterwards, as it’s a harrowing, near-death experience.  Perhaps in shame, that he could never carry off such a risky maneuver himself, Kristján, in an impulsive moment, apparently tries to shoot himself, but miraculously survives.  After returning home from extensive hospital care in Reykjavík, his family refuses to allow Thor anywhere near their son.  There’s a price to be paid in small towns for close friendships, as people in town gossip and carry on as if they have nothing better to do, where these two boys are taunted and tormented, even shunned by those their own age, including the two girls, who refuse to speak to them.  With Kristján secluded offscreen, where Thor has to wonder what in the hell he did to deserve being exiled in his own community, the emotional anguish and social isolation is overwhelming, as there is literally nothing he can do to change people’s opinions, reminiscent of that early scene where a fish was singled out and labeled ugly before it was stomped to death.  People grow up harboring ugly thoughts about anyone or anything that’s different, where especially in small towns, it can drive some kids to suicide.  The poetic finale is filled with the turmoil of confusion and anger, yet plays out with a unique tenderness that is an essential thread throughout every friendship.  Showing great attention to detail, the film plays out in a languorous pace, which doesn’t seem to fit the more adrenaline-paced world of kids this age, yet the detached overall manner adds a timeless, near omniscient view, as if the mountains and oceans and souls of the dead are all observing from a distance.