Young Mongolian filmmakers continue their conquest of hearts and minds on the festival circuit with City of Wind, in which a mild-mannered teenager struggles with the temptations and doubts of young adulthood as he juggles his spiritual calling with his desire for physical and material gratification in a moneyed metropolis.
Following her award-winning short film Snow in September last year, writer-director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir delivers a thoughtful first feature about a young man’s conflicting identities and a nuanced look at her country’s coming-of-age as a capitalist haven – and how a new generation of Mongolians come to terms (and rebel) against the powers shaping this transformation.
Barely months after If Only I Could Hibernate made history by becoming the first Mongolian film to premiere as part of the official selection at Cannes, City of Wind upped the ante by becoming the first feature from the Asian country to storm both the Venice and Toronto festivals. Its social realist drama veers steadfastly away from clichéd clashes between the old and the new – an astonishing feat in itself, given that the young protagonist works as a shaman in the shiny modern veneer of the capital, Ulaanbataar. The film is anchored in a vivid screenplay, an engaging mix of images and sound, and magnetic performances from its two leading actors.
Purev-Ochir’s first feature, this French-Mongolian-Portuguese-Dutch-German-Qatari coproduction has wafted through the festival circuit since its premiere in Venice’s Horizons sidebar, where it bagged a Best Actor award for young Tergel Bold-Erdene. After its latest award-winning stop at the Pingyao International Film Festival in China, where Purev-Ochir took home the Best Director prize, City of Wind should interest programmers and audiences alike with its subtle yet insightful chronicle about the colossal challenges facing contemporary Mongolian youth. But their problems are very much universal too: much like their foreign counterparts, they are weighed down by traditional responsibilities, modern emotions and all the things in between.
What makes City of Wind exceptional is the filmmaker’s refusal to present the main character’s rite of passage as a mere binary battle between tradition and modernity. Rather, the 34-year-old Purev-Ochir presents her country as a land of convergence, and its people as a product of multiple contradictions. Her view is very evident in the many panoramic views of Ulaanbataar unfolding throughout the film, sweeping shots which reveal snow-covered tundras sitting just a mile or so away from smoke-spewing industrial plants, and modern apartment blocks rising high above sprawling “tent-city” settlements. Embodying this mix is Ze (Bold-Erdene), a teenager who we see channeling a “grandfather spirit” as a gravelly-voiced shaman in one scene set in a yurt, and in the next studying in a high school classroom while his schoolmates fiddle with their phones and crack dirty jokes.
Quiet and diligent, Ze is perfectly at peace straddling these two very different worlds. He is the most well-behaved and academically gifted in his cohort, and a teacher’s favourite for not going along with his classmates’ naughty antics. He’s also very much an angel as he helps his mother at her garment market stall downtown and toils with his homework at home – behaviour standing in stark contrast to his slacker elder sister Oyu (Anu-Ujin Tsermaa), who only makes herself useful when she serves as her brother’s assistant during shamanic rites.
Ze’s mild manners and neatly delineated life are shattered when he meets Maralaa (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba). The boy is summoned to predict the girl’s fortunes before she has a pacemaker installed in her heart. Masked and possessed, Ze assures the family he – or, at least, the “grandfather spirit” – will look after Maralaa. The girl, however, is having none of this, and she grabs the boy after the ritual and calls him a “fucking con artist”. Intrigued by her blusterous personality, Ze tracks her on social media, brings her candy at the hospital and is invited to stoop near her chest to listen to her new beating heart – an intimate gesture kick-starting his immersion into this very unstable and mortal thing called love.
With patience, grace and an ability to tease intense frisson out of the young couple’s most mundane activities, Purev-Ochir delivers an engaging look into her characters’ blooming relationship. We see the pair enjoying themselves – as teenage lovers do everywhere – at games arcades, shopping malls, nightclubs and, inevitably, in bed as well. What they talk about are revealing about their culture-specific hopes and fears. Surprisingly, the urbanite Maralaa – whom we later see making local tapestries – aspires to a quiet, rustic life in a country villa, while Ze says his dream home is a completely automated apartment where all household chores are done by clapping his hands.
For all his newly acquired convictions about attaining progress through technology, Ze is never shown to have ditched his traditional beliefs in the ethereal. While very much enjoying his time with Maralaa and all the mischief that entails – hair-dyeing, class-skipping and the like – he remains dedicated to his work as a shaman, and is pained by his inability to summon spirits into this world because he seems to have “upset” them. The fatal consequences of this turn of events and a sad twist in his relationship lead to Ze’s awakenings into adulthood.
To her credit, Purev-Ochir never goes down the easy route of just having Ze abandon “dated” rituals to embrace modern life, or have him realise the error of his contemporary ways and reconnect with his “roots”. He holds onto them and seeks to forge a way – his way – to maintain both. The winds of change in Purev-Ochir’s story are, in fact, generational rather than cultural, as we see in the way Ze, Maralaa and even Oyu defy established norms and develop their own ways of accommodating different influences and circumstances into their lives. This rallying call for independence is vividly illustrated in one of the film’s final and most memorable scenes, when Ze leads his classmates to rebel against the tyranny of their homeroom teacher.
Working with her Portuguese DP Vasco Viana, Purev-Ochir conveys both the grit and the glamour of Ulaanbataar, and the way it serves as the stage on which angst-driven teenagers walk, run and stumble their way towards self-discovery and adulthood. With the help of French editor Matthieu Taponier, the story unspools with a dynamism deserving of its excellent young actors and bustling landscapes.
Director, screenwriter: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
Cast: Tergel Bold-Erdene, Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba, Anu-Ujin Tsermaa, Bulgan Chuluunbat
Producers: Katia Khazak, Charlotte Vincent
Director of photography: Vasco Viana
Editor: Matthieu Taponier
Production design: Bolor-Erdene Naidannyam
Music: Vasco Mendoça
Production companies: Aurora Films, Guru Media, Ume Pedra No Sapato, Bolya Films
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (International Competition)
In Mongolian
103 minutes
