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Just a Mongolian Love Song
February 28, 2008

A singular foreign language entry--and arguably the most “foreign” of foreign films we’ve seen so far this year--Lifesize Entertainment’s Khadak (available on March 4) is a film that was shot and set in Mongolia (and the film’s spoken language is Mongolian). It tells an epic tale of the young nomadic shepherd Bagi, whose destiny dictates that he become a shaman. A plague strikes the animals of the land, which puts a dent in his plans, but it also leads him to meeting a beautiful singer (and thief!) and discovering that the plague was a government lie created to eradicate nomadism. The nomad and the singer incite a revolution wherein Bagi discovers that he really may have mystical powers…

 

It’s a fascinating story, but no more intriguing then the story behind the two Western filmmakers who made the film. Jessica Woodworth, originally from Washington D.C., and Peter Brosens, a cultural anthropologist who

hails from Belgium, are more than just co-directors of Khadak: They’re a married couple who met in—where else?—Mongolia. The two first encountered each other there in 1999-- Woodworth was shooting a documentary, Urga Song, while Brosens was completing his a Mongolia trilogy, which is comprised of City of the Steppes, Poets of Mongolia and 1998’s State of Dogs, a respected entry on the international documentary circuit.   

 

The way Woodworth told the story in a fascinating interview with indieWIRE last fall

(http://www.indiewire.com/people/2007/10/indiewire_inter_115.html), it was she and Brosen's meeting, marriage and an aborted documentary that formed the genesis of Khadak:

 

“We were two married in Germany in 2000. Together, we started researching a documentary about aviation and socialism in Mongolia. We both became uneasy about creating a 56-minute [film] deliverable for public TV featuring these noble and faded pilots we were meeting. We both had very simply lost our will to make documentaries. So we returned to Belgium from our three–month documentary research trip with the seed of Khadak already mind."

Posted by Laurence Lerman on February 28, 2008 | Comments (2)