Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
by Lily and Generoso Fierro
In Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s debut feature, City of Wind (Ser ser salhi), the director provides us an opportunity to witness Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, at a critical point of transition through the interactions between the city and its rural outskirts with the film’s protagonist, Ze, a teenager reaching adulthood while also serving as his community’s shaman. Though her film is classifiable as a coming-of-age story, Purev-Ochir demonstrates impressive dramatic restraint throughout her film, allowing the contemporary and historical forces that are at play in Ulaanbaatar to flow with and against Ze at various points without causing any great battles or struggles while still encouraging a movement in action or perspective. One of the most important of these moments occurs early in the film and sets Ze on a path of quiet but substantial growth.
Ze’s mother has a friend with a daughter who is about to have invasive heart surgery. Before the procedure, the friend asks for a shaman visit from Ze, who kindly obliges. After bringing forth the grandfather spirit, Ze washes up, and his mother’s friend’s recently blessed daughter, Maralaa, confronts him and calls him a fraud. Despite this less than positive first encounter, Ze takes an interest in Maralaa and decides to visit her in his teenage schoolboy form after her surgery. The two become quick friends and then more, and as their relationship develops, we observe both Ze and Maralaa react to each other and the different spaces that they explore together such as a hyper-modern shopping mall, a semi-abandoned rooftop, and a pulsing, neon-lit nightclub, all representing facets of Ulaanbaatar’s urban center.
In contrast to his city experiences with Maralaa, Ze’s home life is more representative of a past that may be fleeting. He lives in an old Soviet-style building on the outskirts of town. And, nearby in a yurt that hearkens to the nomadic traditions of Mongolia, he performs and practices his shaman duties for his community. However, Ze does not visibly express any sense of angst in his polarized existence, and instead, he demonstrates a calm acceptance that both are parts of his reality that he wants to experience and must harmonize as he goes through moments of bliss, grief, heartbreak, and spiritual awakening.
We spoke with Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir over email about the early formation of City of Wind, her collaboration with Tergel Bold-Erdene for his Venice Film Festival award-winning performance as Ze, and the tensions of current day Mongolia that run throughout her film’s characters and surroundings.
LF: We understand that your short films were created after you wrote the script for City of Wind. Mountain Cat and Snow in September both examine teen mortality and sexual awakening and how they are influenced by both modernity and spirituality, all of which are themes within City of Wind. Did you discover anything new with these short films that helped you further develop your main characters of Ze and Maralaa in City of Wind immediately prior to or during filming?
LPO: Mountain Cat and Snow in September are directly and indirectly connected to City of Wind. Mountain Cat is the “proof of concept” for City of Wind. I had written the script and was looking for partners for the project. I made Mountain Cat to give an idea of location and characters because, generally speaking, readers had other ideas about Mongolia than what was presented in the script. It was also an exploration of Maralaa’s character, to see if I was interested in making the feature film from her perspective instead. After doing the short film, I was still interested in doing the feature from Ze’s perspective. At this stage, I also started thinking about the camera and how to explore space and character equally. I knew that I didn’t want to make a film that would follow the main character obsessively. I was keen on capturing a “space and time” that is today’s Ulaanbaatar while following Ze’s journey. With these thoughts in mind, we made Snow in September as a way to explore the other locations for City of Wind (i.e. Soviet buildings) as well as for me to explore my camera. It was like a practice run for Ze.
GF: Maralaa has an immediate aversion to Ze as shaman, and we also see Ze’s classmates mock him a bit about his gift too. Is Western influence the force in contemporary Mongolian society that is pushing young people away from the practice and ideas of shamanism? Or are there other forces at play?
LPO: It’s not Western influence per se. It’s the whole mosaic of our modern life which also includes the entirety of our past history. Mongolian shamanism has endured Buddhism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and globalization. It is a part of Mongolian life that has been systematically destroyed by different forces and yet continues to endure in the lives of Mongolians. My attempt with this film was to show how shamanism manifests in the day-to-day existence of modern day Mongolians and how it endures in their emotional and psychological landscape too. Shamanism has been and continues to be the emotional support for Mongolians who are in need of care, especially the kind of care that contemporary Mongolian society is incapable of providing. The fact that Maralaa and Ze’s classmates are indifferent, and even at times hostile, to Ze’s shamanism is just part of the fabric of today’s Mongolia. It’s important to note here that I also show that, despite this indifference and hostility to shamanism, these young people, with their varied perspectives and varied tastes and varied dreams for the future, are capable of also forming deep and intimate relationships with each other. Modern day Mongolia is a mosaic of different influences, Western and Eastern and historical, but my hope is that the film shows that young and old and even deceased Mongolians unite in their desire to care for each other. On my part, the film is also my attempt at an act of unification.
LF: During our youth, we often come to understand ourselves through opposing viewpoints and experiences. Ze expresses that he wants an urban, contemporary life, and Maralaa wants a rural life. However, in interacting with each other, both realize that their expressed desires may not be true to who they are. In writing the characters of Ze and Maralaa, how aware did you want them to be of their individual selves?
LPO: I didn’t want to make a film about teenage characters who are too aware of themselves and their desires and futures. What was important for me is that there are different viewpoints and experiences, and that the audience experiences the multiplicity of modern-day Mongolian existence through the film. Ze and Maralaa are both young and have ideas for themselves and their futures, but I wanted these ideas to shift with the film. At the end of City of Wind, both Ze and Maralaa’s futures are uncertain. We don’t know if Ze will graduate with honors and go to university and get a fancy job and buy an apartment. We also don’t know if Maralaa will find a way to move to the countryside and live without herding animals. But I hope that the audience will leave the film with the sense that they have witnessed a shift, a growth in both characters. This is a coming-of-age film, in the sense that Ze and Maralaa are growing right in front of our eyes. A sense of this gentle shift is more important to me than the awareness of clear and certain perspectives and ideas of who they are and what they want.
GF: Ze’s relation to his gift as a shaman evolves over the course of the film. Early on, he is connected quite well to the ancestral spirit, perhaps out of a belief in responsibility to his duty. Then he can’t find it, and later he’s able to re-establish the relationship, but with deeper significance. How did you prepare Tergel Bold-Erdene for this process of spiritual growth and development?
LPO: All I could hope to receive from Tergel as an actor is complete sincerity. I didn’t want him to be aware of a grand arc in his character. He’s an amateur actor; it’s his first role. I didn’t think he would respond well to much intellectualizing. I just needed him to be sincere in his emotions in all the scenes. The idea of spiritual growth and development had to come from the film, not from his “acting.” When I first met Tergel, I knew very quickly that he would be suitable for Ze because I found out that, unlike a lot of young men his age whom I met for casting, Tergel had access to his emotions. This is something quite unusual in men, especially Mongolian men, young and old. I had him recite a children’s poem three times. Before each recitation, we had discussions about love, tragedy, and anger. First of all, he didn’t flee from talking about his emotions. And secondly, each recitation of the poem was colored by his emotions. After talking about a tragedy in his family, he was sobbing as he recited this poem about a little lamb. I caught him at a very delicate time. He was still kind of a child when I cast him, 17-18 years old. He had a delicacy and an innocence which were quickly disappearing because, at this age, he and his peers are facing the adult world. I got very lucky with Tergel because he was hanging on to his innocence.
LF: One of the most interesting elements of your film is the role that parents may or may not play in the lives of their children. Ze’s parents set up a household that quietly encourages their children to explore and define their own path: they’re supportive of Ze’s sister as she faces single motherhood, and they allow Ze to decide on his own whether or not he wants to go to university or work after high school. Interestingly, Maralaa’s mother is mostly hands-off in her parenting style too, but unlike Ze’s parents, Maralaa’s mom is rarely around, and her father is in Korea. In both Ze’s and Maralaa’s cases, both end up finding out what they really want in this world with little explicit guidance from their parents. Could you talk about how you approached developing Ze’s and Maralaa’s family dynamics in relation to their individual experiences? How important was it that neither protagonists’ parents were forceful in their parenting?
LPO: It’s so nice that these thoughts came across in the film! While writing the screenplay, it was very difficult to navigate the relationships with parents because the script “required” the parents to be antagonistic forces. There was a bit of this generational conflict that was written and filmed, but ultimately none of it entered the final cut. These “conflicts” with the parents were too dramatic and too forced. They didn’t suit the universe of the film and what I wanted to say with it. City of Wind is interested in tension, not drama. What I ended up showing in the film is the tension of parents facing the fact that their children are growing and knowing themselves. So, the scenes that were left in the film are basically parents who sit, look, face, observe, and are present as their children transform and shift in different ways around them — like Ze’s parents drinking tea together, sitting with the fact that Oyu is gone, and Maralaa’s mother and Maralaa facing each other as women in the corridor. Ultimately parents can’t do anything. It’s a fact of life that children will grow. It was a decision on my part to not dramatize this fact and instead try to capture a bit of this tension.
GF: To give us a better context to the education that Ze has in the film, we’re curious as to what kind of school he attends? For Westerners, it has the appearance of a private academy, but we sense that may not be the case. How typical is the rigidness and discipline of Ze’s school?
LPO: The school is public. Uniforms are mandatory in public schools. For me, the discipline in Ze’s school is symbolic of the oppressive relationship that Mongolian youth have with their future. The future is presented as rigid and limited for Mongolian youth. The concepts of success and happiness are connected to material things like apartments and cars. The “Mongolian dream” is basically an apartment in the center of Ulaanbaatar city. Coming from a culture of nomads who roam the endless steppes freely, this is tragic for me. In the film, I wanted the youth to break away from this rigidity with an act that is joyful and anarchic. The spirit of youthful companionship and revolt was important for me to express.
LF: Ze’s teacher is one of the only adults who projects a vision of what Ze should become, and her vision is of him being a CEO, which would pull him far away from his gift and responsibilities as a shaman. As you wrote the character of the teacher, how aware is she of Ze’s role as a shaman in his community? Is she representative of a contemporary Mongolian educational system that pushes students to extremely urban lives, thus abandoning any semblance of rural existence and moving away from their own cultural and spiritual history?
LPO: Yes, she is representative of how the educational system and the modern “Mongolian dream” push Mongolian youth to strive for urban lifestyles and to abandon nomadic traditions. I wrote her to be one end on the spectrum of things that Ze needs to be aware of on a daily basis. He is a shaman on one hand, but also a modern Mongolian youth on the other. And at any point in the day, he is somewhere on this spectrum, sometimes more as a shaman and sometimes more as a teenager. But, he is always these two things at the same time. The film wants to portray him and Mongolian life as a mosaic of moments that range from traditional to modern: Ze’s existence is all these things at the same time, just differing in texture.◼
Featured photo courtesy of Aurora Films.
https://www.aurorafilms.fr
