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Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir (director), City of Wind, 2023. 103 min.
Films about Mongolia donβt make their way to Europe too often and in the past when they have, they have often been the work of foreign directors, such as Nikita Mikhalkovβs Urga (1991) or Sergei Bodrovβs Genghis Khanβs biopic Mongol (2007). After Baljinnyamyn Amarsaikhanβs Harvest Moon last year, along comes another, City of Wind, the debut film by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, whose short film Snow in September won the top prize in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice in 2022. I canβt confidently say if this is the beginning (or continuation) of a Mongolian New Wave but it certainly seems to constitute a trend.
The titular city in Purev-Ochirβs film is Ulaanbaatar, which is shown to be in the throes of intense development, with shiny new high-rises dotting the skyline and the old neighbourhoods, where yurts jostle on the hillsides with modest bungalows, are in danger of extinction. Our hero is Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene), a teenager nearing the end of secondary school, where the uniforms look British and the discipline Soviet. Ze is also a budding shaman, a role he takes on somewhat reluctantly at the insistence of his expectant family. His mentor is an elderly neighbour, who may or not be a relative (in the subtitles he is addressed as βneighbour-grandfatherβ, which is an honorific whose specific meaning escapes me), and who lives in one of the cosy capacious endangered yurts.
In what is no doubt a breach of shamanic ethics, Ze takes a shine to one of his clients, a girl named Maraala (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba), who is about to undergo heart surgery, and who tells him at their first meeting that she thinks heβs a conman. The two nonetheless start a relationship that plays out in the shopping malls and pounding nightclubs in which they take refuge from the biting winter cold (Ulaanbaatar just edges out Ottawa and Moscow as the worldβs coldest capital). The teen romance is one that we have seen plenty of times before but it doesnβt feel shopworn, possibly because of the setting (urban Mongolia appears disorienting even to people who know Asia, because it seems oddly European, no doubt because of its history as a Soviet satellite, and the Cyrillic script used). A male-centred youth film directed by a young female director also has a pleasing parallax slant that prevents the familiar material from looking exactly like we expect it to be.
City of Wind has a gentle charm, its coming-of-age narrative counterbalanced by a melancholic tension between a rapidly modernising country (for the future of which Zeβs strict schoolteachers exhorts her charges to work hard) and an old way of life that is dying out. It certainly makes me want to watch more films from this relatively little-known country that happens to be a large, if sparsely populated, democracy wedged between two massive autocracies and which yet manages to plot its own course.
How to cite:Β Farry, Oliver. βThe Beginning (or Continuation) of a Mongolian New Wave?βLkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s City of Wind.βΒ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 May 2024,Β chajournal.blog/2024/05/23/city-of-wind.
Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]
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