The Story of the Weeping Camel

This movie is an exquisitely filmed, lyrical tale of four generations of herders living as their ancestors did in a brightly colored yurt. When one of their camels rejects her newborn calf, the family feeds it with a bottle, and the snow-white baby tries in vain to win over its mother or attach itself to another adult camel. Eventually, the family's two young sons are dispatched to the closest town, where they find a musician to perform the ancient ritual intended to jump-start an animal's maternal instincts. It’s just delightful.

Two film students, one Italian, one Mongolian – both studying in Munich - set out for Mongolia's South Gobi desert, where temperatures drop to 20 below and the winds reach 100 miles an hour. With German money and some local knowledge, they set about filming a documentary.

In a short piece that they’d used as a fundraiser, screened before the documentary, the Mongolian gal said that she and her partner were searching for a family with a large number of pregnant Camels and that they were very lucky to find a whole herd of them.

Falorni is tall, lanky and fair-skinned. He grew up in rural Italy. Even though he was put off by the wind and the cold and the unfamiliar food, he loved the tightly knit families living close to the earth. He said that it felt somehow familiar. He was thrown back to his childhood in Italy.

Davaa, a local Mongolian gal, is petite, pretty and wears her dark hair in a chic, short cut. She grew up in Mongolia's capital city, Ulan Bator, and spent summers with her nomadic grandparents. Her mother was an accountant; her father, an engineer.

Both filmmakers are in their early 30's. They had collaborated on student films, and The Story of the Weeping Camel was Falorni's graduation project.