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The story of Weeping Camel is a narrative documentary co-produced by Germany and Mongolia. It is about the lives of a herders’ family with four generations living in the desert of southern Mongolia. The family crams into a yurt and makes their living based on a herd of sheep and camels. The family’s lives are focused on herding, milking, shearing fleece and assisting the births of these animals. The cries of children, the sound of winds on the Gobi, the barking of the camels, and unintelligible Mongolian conversations are all displayed with the movie footages, allowing the audiences to observe their lives in detail.
One of the female camels is suffering from giving birth to her first baby. Persisting for two days, a rare white calf is born with the assistance of the herders, but the mother suffers so much that she is unwilling to let her calf get close, nurse, or enjoy her love. The baby camel is starving but cannot bear to leave his mother.
To save the baby camel, the grandfather sends his two grandsons to the town to invite a musician to play music for an ancient Mongolian Hoos ritual. The folk musician plays a horse-headed fiddle while the female family member sings an old Mongolian song and grooms the irritated female camel’s mane. All the camels turn their heads and listen to the calming song and beautiful melody of the Hoos. Miraculously, the mother camel starts to calm down and weep, finally accepting her child with tears.
Hoos is a solemn, life-saving ritual symbolising the Mongolian people's respect and wisdom for life. For thousands of years, they have adhered to the lifestyle of working with the sunrise and resting at sunset, never complaining about the harshness of nature and always being persuasive rather than violent when confronting disobedient animals. They revere nature. This way of life is precious, but also fragile; it is no longer able to resist the invasion of "civilisation."
As the two children are on their way to locate a musician, the television sets and the motorbikes are shown one after another in the footage. The younger boy is fascinated by the songs, dances and cartoons on TV, and even tells his grandfather that he wants to have one back home. The grandfather disagrees, saying: “You would not do anything if you have that glass box... you do not need that thing, otherwise you will be staring at the screen all day."
The development of the social environment has negatively affected the transmission of the ritual, and "the film also hints at the changing existence of these remaining nomadic peoples" (St. Ours, 2011, p. 397). Motorcycles are replacing camels as a means of transportation, and more and more young herders are migrating to urban areas meaning the number of descendants willing to pass on this tradition is rapidly decreasing. In 2015, UNESCO included hoos in the "List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding." But what about other Mongolian traditions and cultures? And how long can they be conserved?
Written by Weiwei Xiao
References：
‘Coaxing ritual for camels’. Available at: https://ich.unesco.org/en/USL/coaxing-ritual-for-camels-01061 (Accessed at 2021/04/18).
‘The story of the Weeping Camel’. Available at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Weeping_Camel (Accessed at 2021/4/17).
St. Ours, K (2011), ‘An Ecocritical Study of "The Story of the Weeping Camel”’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 18(2), pp. 396-412.
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