A useful debut function from 34-year-old Mongolian film-maker Zoljargal Purevdash, impressed by her childhood experiences of learning for a life-changing instructional scholarship, in addition to by the poverty-stricken tented yurt district of the capital Ulaanbaatar the place her mom owned a store and the place she noticed the purchasers’ robust lives. Within the movie, Purevdash has gender-switched her physics-student teen hero to a boy and evidently fictionalised her personal college challenges by transplanting them to a household from simply this type of disadvantaged background, battling towards hardship and the bitter and horrible chilly, craving to have the ability to see out the winter by hibernating, like a bear. Unable to afford coal, youngsters rip up wood planks from fences and go on unlawful “logging” raids into surrounding woodland.
Nonprofessional newcomer Battsooj Uurtsaikh performs Ulzii, a 14-year-old child dwelling in a yurt with two boisterous siblings and a hardworking mum who could at any second relapse into alcoholism and melancholy. Ulzii has an escape route from all this – though Purevdash apparently reveals us that for a 14-year-old it’s not perceived as an escape route, however an additional burden of strangeness and specialness. He’s good at maths and physics, and his passionate trainer is urging him to go for regional and nationwide competitions with money prizes and college scholarships.
After all, this implies further lessons, tuition, dedication, taking time away from doing jobs and work which his household wants; it’s a wager on a glowing aspirational future through which Ulzii doesn’t fairly consider. And issues get even worse when his mum falls off the wagon and disappears, leaving Ulzii to look after his siblings on his personal. Like Hollywood motion pictures corresponding to Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Looking from 1997, the movie reveals the 2 conflicting forces: the escape impetus and the loyalty impetus, the plain craving to get out of a troublesome state of affairs and the countervailing sense that to take action would imply reducing your self from household, with a ensuing guilt and ache that will in all probability persist all through your life. Maybe the movie may have given us a clearer view of the trainer’s interior life and previous, however that is nonetheless an apparently downbeat, shrewd drama.
