KHADAK

Set in the bleak but beautiful frozen steppes of remote Mongolia, the film tells the epic story of Bagi, a boy who can hear distressed animals over long distances. This power, along with a violent epileptic seizure, convinces the local shamaness that Bagi will become a shaman himself. Before he can come to terms with this prediction, his family's life is changed forever with the arrival of a military convoy. A terrible plague has swept the country; all citizens must relocate into towns and their animals must be slaughtered.
Bagi finds himself in a bleak mining community, his powers vanished, his family drifting away. But he falls in with an alluring coal thief named Zolzaya who sets him off on a path of self-realization and resistance against the corrupt authorities.
The steppes have been muse to many great filmmakers - Nikita Mikhalkov, Sergei Bodrov, Zhang Yimou - but never has this landscape been captured with such sublime grace. It allows us to follow young Bagi's spiritual journey and when Bagi assumes his shamanic leadership, one feels an incredible sense of wonder.
Set in the bleak but beautiful frozen steppes of remote Mongolia, the film tells the epic story of Bagi, a boy who can hear distressed animals over long distances. This power, along with a violent epileptic seizure, convinces the local shamaness that Bagi will become a shaman himself. Before he can come to terms with this prediction, his family's life is changed forever with the arrival of a military convoy. A terrible plague has swept the country; all citizens must relocate into towns and their animals must be slaughtered.
Bagi finds himself in a bleak mining community, his powers vanished, his family drifting away. But he falls in with an alluring coal thief named Zolzaya who sets him off on a path of self-realization and resistance against the corrupt authorities.
The steppes have been muse to many great filmmakers - Nikita Mikhalkov, Sergei Bodrov, Zhang Yimou - but never has this landscape been captured with such sublime grace. It allows us to follow young Bagi's spiritual journey and when Bagi assumes his shamanic leadership, one feels an incredible sense of wonder.