The Eagle Huntress
The Eagle Huntress, a documentary about a Kazakh nomad girl in Mongolia learning to hunt with a golden eagle, divides opinion. It is up for a Bafta award on Sunday night but missed out on an Oscar nomination, possibly because to some viewers it feels staged. Director Otto Bell, however, denies all accusations that the film was scripted, acted or re-enacted.
There are times when The Eagle Huntress feels more like fiction than fact
Bell spent more than a year in Mongolia capturing the story of Aisholpan and her family. A rosy-cheeked, pigtail wearing, straight-A student, Aisholpan has a burning ambition to follow in the footsteps of her father and become an eagle huntress. Such a desire is clearly unacceptable to hardliners who believe that only men are worthy of such an honour and that women have their own special place in the circle of life milking cows, preparing meals and keeping the yurt clean.
Some of the film’s humour comes from interviews with a selection of men who seem to visibly suck their teeth and purse their lips as they contemplate the horrors of what she is proposing.
Aisholpan’s decision to join the 70 all-male competitors in the annual Golden Eagle Festival lends the film a structure as the countdown to the event is matched by her training sessions. The Festival itself provides a series of challenges in the fashion of a Young Adult novel in which Aisholpan must pit herself against the best in a bid to win respect.
If documentaries were tube rated purely on the lovability of their main characters, The Eagle Huntress would soar its way to classic status. Even as things stand, it's a food bet to clinch the Best Documentary Oscar for which it's been ling-listed. It focuses on Aisholpan Nurgaiv, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl, who becomes the toast of her family when excelling in the traditionally male-dominated sport of eagle training.
If we absolutely must, we’ll forgive the rote-inspirational soundtrack, too, which has Australian pop goddess Sia yodelling breathily over the film’s many (too many) fly-by drone shots of the snow-covered Altai Mountains. (Over the end credits, Sia bursts forth with the actual lyrics “Yooouu caaan doo anything”, which really is pushing it.)
For my documentary production
- The narrative may be similar with The Eagle Huntress, since we need to film people do their best to get the opportunities to study abroad. ( I might film some clips about the real processes -- from applying school to preparing to go abroad)
- However, there are many people who are traditional and strict might have some misunderstanding about studying abroad.
- Learning from The Eagle Huntress, to show the misunderstanding and disagree with studying abroad, my camera might focus on the face expression of people rather than just language while it interviews them)
- I will use traditional Chinese music in the misunderstanding interview clips, since it can represents traditional .