Cave of the Yellow Dog

Mongolian-born, German-trained and financed director Byambasuren Davaa’s follow-up to ‘The Story of the Weeping Camel’  delivers more of the same: a low-key drama-documentary about her country’s nomadic herdspeople with an animal theme and an elliptical title. The drama is slight: little Nansal, eldest daughter of the Batchuluuns, a real nomad family filmed by Davaa and her crew, brings home a stray dog. Her father wants rid of it, worried it’ll bring wolves who’ll decimate his sheep, while the titular myth, about a sick girl healed when her dog is shut away in a cave hardly helps doggy’s case to disprove himself a harbinger of doom. The documentary element captures the Batchuluuns’ disappearing way of life (intimations of approaching modernity abound), but you can’t help feeling that it panders to Western audiences as it lingers on their everyday tasks – chopping wood, making cheese, dismantling yurts, collecting dung – as if they’re all intrinsically fascinating. A straight documentary might have better imparted their plight, while an out-and-out drama might have proved, well, dramatic.