There is something to be said about cinema made by people familiar with a subject. They often bring a passion to capturing it in a way that feels very personal. That comes across in Xiaoxuan Jiang’s To Kill a Mongolian Horse in the loving depictions of horse shows, each captured so stunningly, and with emotion that jumps off the screen, but also in the main narrative struggle of Mongolian horseman who is one of the performers in the show as job try and save his family ranch. When considering the title, you get a sense right from the beginning of the film, when it explains how the subtitles will work with white subtitles being for dialogue spoken in Mongolian and yellow in Mandarin that these two languages and cultures will be placed on societal tiers with people that are holding onto the traditional ways (Mongolian and the Horseman) reduced than those of the more modernized (Mandarin-speaking and city-working). The protagonist of the film is Saina who is inspired by Jiang’s real-life friend of the same name who “had to make similar choices [as the character] to make money and find his place in society,” and early on we watch as the mother of his child decide their son will be educated in the city because she wants him to start learning English and Mandarin early, not just Mongolian. It’s a loving film about struggling to hold onto your culture and watching what remains, get commercialized.
I have seen Cavalia, a different kind of horse show, and seeing riders and performers who know and understand each other is stunning. I’ve also watched many horses beautifully captured on film before, both with riders and without, and the performances, and the way they were filmed, in To Kill a Mongolian Horseare some of the most stunning images I’ve seen. One of the performances, in particular, reminded me of the zoetrope of the galloping horses. And the order of the performances was well done too as they fit with the narrative unfolding, joyful at the beginning, and then we got what appeared to be a horse dying, only for it to rise again. Possibly symbolizing the hope that you can never fully kill the culture as long as people are holding onto parts. And now, this film itself serves as a testament to that culture. So even though Saina is going through it and is losing things, it doesn’t mean that eventually his son won’t want to seek out his Mongolian cultural heritage on his own, and this film may serve as a stepping stone to it.
Outside of the horse show sequences, which have a slickness to them, the film has a rawness to it. This makes sense given that like Saina, the rest of the cast were nonprofessionals. I generally like nonprofessionals in films, because they have a rawness, an openness to their performance, and it comes off as almost documentary, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Which, is particularly helpful for a film drawn from the real experiences of its lead.
I mentioned the captioning already, and, while I thought they worked well on a narrative level, if they get the opportunity, they could be cleaned up before the film gets distributed. Currently, there are brackets denoting Mongolian or Mandarian before each change. While it was possibly helpful at the beginning of the film, or maybe even after a very long sequence of only one language, its overuse became a distraction.
To Kill a Mongolian Horse had its World Premiere in the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days), and independent section at the 81st annual Venice International Film Festival.
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