The Eagle Huntress

It’s hard to imag­ine how the lives of Mon­go­lian nomads of the Altai Moun­tains, who have hunt­ed with gold­en eagles for thou­sands of years, could strike a chord with west­ern urban civil­i­sa­tion. But The Eagle Huntress, Otto Bell’s beau­ti­ful, cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive doc­u­men­tary, strikes at the very heart of our pri­mal instincts to strive and succeed.

The film fol­lows 13-year-old Aishol­pan as her father trains her to become the first female eagle huntress in Mon­go­lia – a job that has always been passed down from father to son over the cen­turies. Laid out as a grip­ping tri­umph-over-gen­der-adver­si­ty nar­ra­tive, it moves more like a dra­ma than a dry, strict­ly objec­tive study of behav­iour and cul­tur­al colour. The clear, three-part struc­ture accen­tu­ates each dif­fer­ent stage of her grow­ing skill with­in a field dom­i­nat­ed by dis­mis­sive, mid­dle-aged men.

Bell dives direct­ly into Aistolpan’s world, with eagle-POV aer­i­al shots sweep­ing over the remote Mon­go­lian plains. An orig­i­nal song writ­ten and per­formed by Aus­tralian pop­star Sia accom­pa­nies awe-inspir­ing shots of vast land­scapes, gen­er­at­ing a spir­i­tu­al almost mys­ti­cal atmos­phere that couldn’t be fur­ther away from the real­i­ty of our over-pop­u­lat­ed, pol­lut­ed mod­ern world.

There’s a crisp­ness to the cin­e­matog­ra­phy too, every puff of chim­ney smoke or shot of eagles gnaw­ing on sheep guts ren­dered with strik­ing clar­i­ty. There are no tourist-friend­ly guides invad­ing the frame to bridge the cul­tur­al gap, only Eng­lish sub­ti­tles trans­lat­ing the family’s own words. Daisy Ridley’s voiceovers occur at awk­ward­ly spo­radic inter­vals, yet her nar­ra­tion does add some­thing to the film’s nar­ra­tive dri­ve. Besides, as the first female Jedi knight, Rid­ley has a sort a con­nec­tion to Aisholpan.

It is direc­tor Bell’s focus on fam­i­ly bonds and our rela­tion­ship with the nat­ur­al world that makes his film tru­ly affect­ing though. Close-ups of Ais­tol­pan affec­tion­ate­ly caress­ing her lit­tle eaglet mir­ror images of her father qui­et­ly cher­ish­ing his daughter’s achieve­ments. It is not dif­fi­cult to see how much love and pride the fam­i­ly have for one anoth­er. The Eagle Huntress is a cel­e­bra­tion of female empow­er­ment, boil­ing down the messy, com­plex nuances of mod­ern day fem­i­nism into one sim­ple idea: women every­where can relate to Aistolpan’s straight­for­ward belief that it is a woman’s right to choose.