Mike Roman Its not often I am moved enough to write a review for a film. This is not because of a hardening of my heart but rather because of the lack of 'cinema' and 'film' out there, and the subsequent plethora of 'movies' and pernicious 'entertainment'. Of around the 250 'films' I see a year maybe one catches my heart and tugs it to such an extent that I cannot but write something about it. Accordingly, it is not I who is doing the writing, but the film that writes through me, through its power, its force, and its essence. The Cave of the Yellow Dog is one such film, and having just been mesmerized by it I cannot believe it has taken me almost a decade to discover it, but, from the other perspective, I am overjoyed that I did finally discover it. Perhaps the reason for my discovering it is that I am in Kazakhstan teaching (and learning!), and was curious as to the cinema around the region. The other reason is that I am in the energy capital of the country Atyrau, a washed out hole of a town, infected by the rape of the earth and the desire for greed by ignorant oilers and the like, most of whom come from the west, North America, and Europe, and are the complete and utter antithesis of the Mongol family being filmed in TCOTYD. In spite of Atyrau's status as the new Houston, it is possibly the most cobbled together hotchpotch of buildings and roads that I have ever seen in a life thus far of travelling and thinking. 'Spiritually unsympathetic' to coin a phrase by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky comes to mind, and that's being generous. The earth around the city is to all intents and purposes dead. Nothing grows on it; it is, after all a huge building site, primed for construction as the barrels roll out and the money rolls in. The water table has been plumbed to the point of surface saturation whenever it rains; the great Ural river has been infected with the disease of man, which he calls progress. It is all rather bleak and grim. And then you have the great glass castles of the oilers themselves: monuments to the fallen: Tengizchevron, Mobil, Exxon and all the others; ignorant violators who have clubbed together to do this place over. The pain of the earth is tangible, it's blood being sucked by these vampiric monstrous outsiders, all rationalising their actions in terms of bringing 'civilization' to an otherwise 'backward' place. And so, to The Cave of the Yellow Dog which reminded me - re-mind-ed the great self that is not 'me' but the great souled 'I', that man is a perversion of the human: man is the human minus the humus, the soil, the land. I need not go into statistics of soil degradation, of deforestation, of the deliberate desiccation of the soul for the sake of pathetic costumes, and pitiful masks… for the sake of cosmetic appearances. What The Cave of the Yellow Dog has as a film is depth, but it is a lightness of depth, not a profundity, and it is this lightness that drew me in from the very first scene. The simplicity of it all (yet within a deep complexity) of a family eking out a harmonious existence on the great Mongolian steppe, is overwhelming.There is within this film a searing soulfulness: these are not children being exploited for making movies; these are simply children being filmed as they are. It is wonderful. The animals, as they are, the family as they are, the land, as it is. Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! And that is to say nothing of all the beautiful things that are made by loving hands and not machines: their clothes, their furniture, their yurt itself.The family play themselves, the word play itself being operative here, as there is no work, no toil or coarse superfluous labour as we have come to know it in the west, but simply endeavor, and the play of song and dance. Everything done here is essential, and of the essence. The music, too, is quite sublime and will draw you out of your manufactured identity into a wider more spacious self that you perhaps never knew was there.Words cannot do it justice. It is a film, like the great steppe itself, which cannot be explicated, but can only be lived, or at the next best, watched with an open heart. It made me think of how people have lost their way as human beings living with the earth and not against it, and how, in the west, the hand-made has also become a commodity, like time and space, like being and experience itself. The photography and the land is exquisite; the patience of the people involved evident, but then patience is no big deal when you are one with the land. In Atyrau, sadly, there is no one-ness, little harmony left, as the new younger and more seduced civilization enters the sauna of need, greed, and fear, all the while sucking the life right out of them.Civilization is a slaughterhouse, but here on the great steppe, in the cave of the yellow dog, civilization is nothing; and it is this nothingness if attended to sensitively and intelligently enough that will bend your soul back into shape.

fwomp Picturesque and unbridled, THE CAVE OF THE YELLOW DOG is Mongolian in the extreme. More of a stream of consciousness in terms of style, The Cave of the Yellow Dog's director, Byambasuren Davaa, gives us her second feature length film that has the look and feel of a wayward docudrama but gives us a story that materializes by happenstance (her first being the well-done STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL).Watching the extra features on the DVD gives one the insights you'll need to understand Ms. Davaa's style of filming. No script. No actors. Just real people doing real lines ...for the most part. The only "story" that weaves its way in is that of the yellow dog and his cave, revealed by an old crone who lives near our Mongolian family's current location.The family is the Batchuluun family, a husband, wife, a mischievous (and very young) son, a young daughter, and another daughter — the eldest — Nansal. It is Nansal who we get to know best as she returns from school in "the city" to her family's nomadic grounds in mountainous western Mongolia. The panoramic shots of the surrounding countryside are achingly beautiful, with fiery sunsets, Grand Canyon-sized valleys, and hillocks of grazing lands mixed with flowering blooms. The topography is often more interesting than the story itself, which meanders hither and thither; from children playing ...to working the farm to finding a not-yellow dog in a nearby cave.The puppy that Nansal finds is the culmination of what should have been the film's central point. Her obsession over the dog and befriending it causes a rift between Nansal and her father, who doesn't want the dog to attract prowling packs of wolves to their homestead and their goat herd. Nansal loses interest in everything but the pup, even going so far as to not pay attention to the family herd and, eventually, to lose sight of her young brother whom she's supposed to be keeping an eye on. When Nansal stumbles upon an old lady living in a distant yurt, she learns the story of what can happen when someone finds a dog in a cave (although the old lady's story-dog was yellow and Nansal's is black and white ...and named Spot.) ... I won't say anymore, though, for fear of giving away what could be considered the "plot." Getting back to the extra features...Director Davaa all but admits that they really had no plan on what to film, just taking it day-by-day and letting the story unfold as it may. So what became an actual plot developed by accident, which I find a bit irritating and refreshing. What if the plot hadn't developed and all we'd gotten were glimpses into the life of a western Mongolian family? I can't help but think that this would've been disastrous for the film. But, thankfully, the story DID come through and we get something unique and pretty darned original.

tamala75 I first saw this movie at the outdoor cinema of La Villette last summer (every summer in the parc of "la villette", north of Paris, they show movies on an inflatable giant screen, people lay in the grass after a picnic or can rent transat chairs and blankets). It was just magical seeing those Mongolian landscapes while the Parisian sky was changing colors from blue to red and dark blue, and feeling the grass and earth beneath. This movie is so simple and things just seem to happen naturally like if you were sharing the life of this very touching family. The scenes with the kids are particularly sweet, makes you want to bury under a warm blanket... especially when the night wind cools you (definitely need a blanket if you lay in the grass to see a movie!).

tsotko Great Mongolian Cultural experience. I thought the subtitles were little weak and some of the words were translated incorrectly. Other than that I have nothing to complain about the movie. I don't know why? When they translated the dogs name into ZOCHOR, when the girl clearly calls the dog " Tsookhor" which means Dalmation ( the girl called her dog as DALMATION because of the brown spot on the dogs head). And before she gave name to the dog she only called her puppy. But the subtitle says LITTLE ONE.I laughed through out the movie, because I understood Mongolian. Half of the audience were Mongolian in the theater when I watched the movie and they all laughed and enjoyed the movie. It reminded me of my first theater movie experience in the US. I did not understand anything and I found the movie so boring, when other people were laughing their ass' off. But still it's a must watch movie and I hope that you would enjoy.