Ser ser salhi – City of Wind – Città del vento

Directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir

Starrings: Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba, Tergel Bold-Erdene, Bulgan Chuluunbat, Tsend-Ayush Nyamsuren, Ganzorig Tsetsgee

Origin: Qatar Germany Netherlands Portugal Mongolia France

Year 2023

Review author: Shane Virunphan

Click Here for Italian Version

“Your dream is distant.”

The Mongolian people have marked the history of many nations:

“…About 1 percent of the world's male population has evidence in their genetic makeup that they are descended from Chinggis Qa'an or his immediate ancestors.” (1)

In the early 13th century, the Mongol Genghis Khan began a sweeping conquest of the known world:

“Their empire reached the Adriatic Sea, reaching Croatia.” (2)

Mongolia has the charm of a powerful, and above all magical, nature.

Magical for its bucolic dimension with a vast steppe, a torrid summer and a cruel winter. The territories outside of Ulaanbaatar are large but with a limited population.

The inhabitants have a deep spirituality.

The symbol of Mongolia, present on the flag and in any public place, is the Soyombo. The ideogram was created by Zanabazar, an artist monk of the seventeenth century. The meaning is “may the Mongol nation exist by its own right”. The Soyombo has a religious value, the center represents yin and yang. Around, the other geometric figures recall spiritualities, such as the sky, fire, the sun, nature.

Despite numerous years of communism and atheism (during the dictatorship all Buddhist temples were destroyed), spirituality did not disappear, remaining indispensable for Mongolians, including young people.

The devotion of Buddhism is the most evident, the most concealed is shamanism. Both coexist without problems. In tents thick with smoke, shamans celebrate rites with songs and drums to evoke spirits.

But this Mongolia is also undergoing changes. The nomadic population is settling in the tall skyscrapers of Ulaanbaatar. However, the vast spaces exist, the large yurts still dominate the panorama even just outside the centre.

Far from the city one experiences a feeling of solitude, of difficulty, of suffering, of considerable work, analyzed by the novels of the Mongolian writer Galsan Tschinag, such as the highly sensitive Il cielo azzurro (AER Edizione, Bolzano, 1996). The Dschurukuwaa child grows up without a cell phone and a computer, forced to face the tortures of a stepmother nature as a child, yet he loves this condition, his steppe because he is aware of being an integral part of it despite the arrival of the terrible, unbearable and brutal winter:

“Oh, what a cruel-hearted father you are!

…

O you who punish us so harshly! What have we been guilty of?! We haven't always lived faithfully to you, in submission and in absolute respect for your laws, ah?! Why then do you punish us with such ferocity and without any mercy, iiih? You want to force us to deny you and follow other teachings! …” (3)

The Mongolia of Dschurukuwaa is changing, perhaps slowly but surely.

This new Mongolia is narrated with affection and passion by the Mongolian director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir in the film Ser ser salhi – City of Wind – City of the Wind, presented at the 80th Venice International Film Festival.

Shot of the steppe, a mountain, snow.

In a tent, an old man and a sorcerer are performing a ritual. The old man's son is far away. There are still many shacks around.

Cut to the school. It is a modern school, the students are in uniform. The best student is Ze. And Ze is also the sorcerer from the previous scene. He is only seventeen, but he is mature, studies carefully, takes care of his family, lives with his parents and sister. He has a strong emotionality. This emotionality pushes him to sense spirits and transform himself into a sought-after sorcerer.

One day he is called to perform a ritual for a teenager, Maralaa. She has to undergo a complicated operation. Her mother asks her sorcerer Ze to perform a ritual to protect her.

The young woman is skeptical, reluctant. She insults him, she considers him a cheat, a scoundrel.

Ze is the opposite of Maralaa but he is attracted by her temperament, by her personality. The visit to the hospital after the operation, Ze, maybe he is a swindler, but he is a beautiful and sexy boy.

A love story begins between the two, with reckless gestures, wandering through the history of Ulaanbaatar. But diversity prevails in the end. Maralaa leaves him to go and live in South Korea with her father while Ze remains the spiritual sorcerer capable of understanding hearts and nature.

The priority topic is that of Mongolia. But the author breaks away from Enlightenment patterns by reiterating a concept: there is no contrast between modernity and spirituality.

“...but in practice in real life what I find is that nothing is so dualistic and dialectical...that's why it's extremely important to me that this film doesn't talk about tradition versus modernism...it was very important that I represented life in Mongolia like a mosaic... I guess you can say that it's a question of tension, you can say that there is a tension between these two aspects..." (4)

There is no dualism and dialectics, there is no struggle between progress and tradition. For the director, the plot is a "mosaic" and it's true. The film has a structure with several small episodes, minimal scenes, some concerning the shaman and others more contemporary such as the theft of the bag. Ze plays both roles, he is current and conservative, there is no distinction. For Ze, modern school and the study of English do not pollute the influences of nature and ancestral spirits.

If they coexist in Ze, they can even coexist in Mongolia.

The affection for her country is the theme of Ser ser salhi. Since the film is a "mosaic", it takes up many aspects of the story. The obvious ones and the hidden ones. The blurred yurt, the religiosity, the naturalism. Obviously Soviet influences are present, such as the architecture of the time, the writings:

“... you see some Soviet monuments and Soviet apartments but at the same time there are all these modern apartments but then there are the neighborhoods where more and more nomads are moving to the city and then there are the mountains which in a certain sense they suggest the Mongolian countryside and there is music too.” (5)

The two boys frequent these places as well as the opulent mall. These are the demands of a nascent bourgeoisie, of rampant capitalism, of skyscrapers where one dreams of living abandoning the smoky tents:

“…trying to give a portrait, almost a documentation of life in Mongolia at this time… (6)

...

“... they tell the story of the last twenty years of our history ... I want to give almost a historical point of view ... representative of our stories since we became capitalists” (7)

To tell the story, the author is precise, observant, culturally diligent, she makes rigorous choices and describes the two main characters with psychological attention.

Ze is a responsible teenager but with many experiences to achieve. The spiritual factor comes from within him, while it is the modernity of Maralaa that weans him. It exploits him, forcibly pushing him towards love, sexuality, and premeditatedly breaks his heart for selfish and futile reasons.

Ze has power. She sees in a hallucination quick fragments of a separate life, capable of detecting death. She on the other hand lives with her sister and at night she plays the wind chime.

He has no character defects, he is open with his family, friends and companions. Fundamental topic for the director:

“...understand what her relationship was with her parents, with her sister, with her friends, with her neighbor and with wider society…” (8)

Ze is always available, with a lot of naivety he does not recognize people's threats. He is ready to love an aggressive and offensive girl to respond to his desire for him.

He is intelligent, perceptive, kind, generous, hieratic, priestly, solemn, hardworking, sensible, has a high sense of duty, renounces a job to be able to continue to be with the family.

The sense of duty does not belong to Maralaa. She is haughty, harsh, right-thinking, cynical, sulky, ungrateful, petty, snobbish. It is the fake reformist, capitalist, liberal element. She doesn't like his country, in fact she prefers Korea to him. They are two discordant sensibilities. Maralaa accuses Ze of being a cheater but in reality she is the one who is a cheater.

Separately they are different, together they are the mosaic of Mongolia.

There is uneasiness in the sequences of shamanic ceremonies. The French director Fabienne Berthaud tried it in the film Un Monde Plus Grand - A Bigger World presented in Venice in 2019, with games of music, rhythm, camera movement but leaving a doubt and not caring about the social element.

The peculiarity of Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir is a meticulousness of looks, of close-ups of faces. Using these two components the director draws shamanism:

“…I really wanted to focus on people's faces too, I really wanted to make it focus on people's looks and people just look at each other and see each other…because that's part of my exploration of spirituality, like what spirituality is, how the I will represent.” (9)

...

“…it goes back to that moment when I went to a shaman and kind of the inspiration behind the whole movie. Pretend that the rituals are extremely intimate… it's the fact that you're so close during the rituals and the fact that they smell you like Mongolians kiss and you know you're going to be caressed and you're comforted… the spirituality in this film is the intimacy.” (10)

...

“…it's also with people who are no longer present and that's what these rituals in Shamanism are about: you can talk to your 9.29 Ancestral Spirits…so it's also this intimacy that exists between people who they are no longer there, they are no longer present and it is also in intimacy with the cosmos..." (11)

These details serve to outline the intimacy in the rites. Kissing, smelling, touching are the sorcerer's approaches to the bodies of others, even outpourings towards unknown people. These physical and introspective cares involve sorcerer and host at the same time.

It also happens in the family environment like Ze's dreams with her scabrous coitus with close people. Therefore the film maintains a tone, a deliberately minimalist composition, as stated by the director:

“… and that's why I generally approached the style of the film in a naturalistic, very minimal way, I didn't want, I don't know magical realism, just because we have shamanism… I didn't want to make any big statements…” ( 12)

In the shot of the Maralaa ritual, Ze is surrounded by the sounds of drums, the camera rises and dissolves into the close-up of the girl.

The essential style is accompanied by a clear, exact structure, with a progressive tension, a rhythm dictated by the characteristics of the fumes, the white of the snow, the isolation in the midst of nature, the sun, the moon, the river:

“... I also want to show how Mongolians interact with nature, constantly conversing with the sun, the moon and the river ... for me this is spirituality ... I want to represent the intimacy of Mongolia.” (13)

Everything in the film is connected to nature:

“By now the mountains and the steppe had become dazzling black and white, as if overwhelmed by the stormy waves of a moving sea of snow. That cold light even hurt the eyes. A wind blew that seemed to cut, saw, penetrate and flay everything in its path.” (14)

The film is powerful, honest, patriotic. An intense, intellectual, religious patriotism.

Of course there are some downfalls. For example, the terrifying scene of the students howling like dogs, a distressing canine Dead Poets Society, or an alarm for the numerous strays wandering around in the dark streets.

Even a few more extended cuts would have increased the fun and disagreement, but the director proudly raises a national flag with the Soyombo drawn.

1. Michele Bernardini, Donatella Guida, I Mongoli. Espansione, imperi, eredità, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. Mappe. Storia, Torino, 2012, Pag. XVI Translated by authour

2. Michele Bernardini, Donatella Guida, I Mongoli. Espansione, imperi, eredità, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. Mappe. Storia, Torino, 2012, Pag. 62 Translated by authour

3. Galsan Tschinag, Il cielo azzurro, AER Edizione, Bolzano, 1996, Pag. 139 Translated by authour

4. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (11,29)

5. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (6,30)

6. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (4,00)

7. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (6,03)

8. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (3,48)

9. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (7,23)

10. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (7,49)

11. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (9,19)

12. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (4,16)

13. https://youtu.be/FyrQsd5O-2E?si=eQIPzTL15DlI8vC9 (9,35)

14. Galsan Tschinag, Il cielo azzurro, AER Edizione, Bolzano, 1996 Translated by authour