AS MONGOLIA TURNS URBAN
The Economist recently published a three-page briefing about Mongolia, which sits on vast reserves of copper and gold. “Mongolia has a chance,” the paper wrote, “of becoming a Qatar or a Brunei: a country that has only a small population, but almost all of it, in global terms, loaded.” Money is flowing into Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, and people are following. Part of this huge cultural change is that city dwellers no longer feel the pull of the nomadic herding traditions. Twenty years ago, the paper says, it was hard to meet anyone in Ulaanbaatar “who identified with the city”.
There aren’t many movies that you can buy on Amazon that give you a flavour of Mongolian life, but one that does was released 20 years ago. The mismatch between the city and the country is its main theme. “Urga”, released in Britain and America as “Close to Eden”, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Directed by the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, it’s the story of Gombo, who lives with his wife, three children and a grandmother in a yurt on the steppe.
Their traditional life of herding and horse-riding on the grasslands is observed with documentary patience and the camera lingers, nostalgically, on the domestic details—the grandmother cuts fatty slices of mutton into her mouth; a daughter plays ditties on a giant accordion; Gombo’s wife Pagma gets her children to sleep, three to a bed.
One day, Gombo goes to the city, where his horse’s hooves clatter on the pavement, and he and his Russian friend Sergei go drinking at a gaudy nightclub. When Gombo heads back to the steppe, he has a TV slung over his horse, and the 20th century is about to enter family life. Today, as Mongolia issues 3,000 mining licences (and its world transforms), the 21st century will follow hard on its heels.
Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life
There aren’t many movies that you can buy on Amazon that give you a flavour of Mongolian life, but one that does was released 20 years ago. The mismatch between the city and the country is its main theme. “Urga”, released in Britain and America as “Close to Eden”, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Directed by the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, it’s the story of Gombo, who lives with his wife, three children and a grandmother in a yurt on the steppe.
Their traditional life of herding and horse-riding on the grasslands is observed with documentary patience and the camera lingers, nostalgically, on the domestic details—the grandmother cuts fatty slices of mutton into her mouth; a daughter plays ditties on a giant accordion; Gombo’s wife Pagma gets her children to sleep, three to a bed.
One day, Gombo goes to the city, where his horse’s hooves clatter on the pavement, and he and his Russian friend Sergei go drinking at a gaudy nightclub. When Gombo heads back to the steppe, he has a TV slung over his horse, and the 20th century is about to enter family life. Today, as Mongolia issues 3,000 mining licences (and its world transforms), the 21st century will follow hard on its heels.
Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life
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