37 Uses for a Dead Sheep

This film by Ben Hopkins is a semi documentary about the recent life time history of a nomadic tribe the Pamir Kirghiz. Originally from the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia they were forced to migrate from country to country. The film has the Pamir Kirghiz acting out their own tribal history with humour and diffidence and switches between events in the past and events in the making of the film. The older members of the tribe long to return to the mountains where they had eek-ed out an existence in the border lands between Russia, Afghanistan and China.

To survive the oppressions by each totalitarian state they moved from Soviet Union, to Afghanistan, then to Pakistan and finally to Eastern Turkey. In Turkey they have found sanctuary but the cost is to loose their identity. But how does this happen? Go and see the film.

You could say, with predictable wit, that there are 37 films one could see any night so why choose this one? Well, it has humour and respect. It mixes its approach as documentary and also story telling and catches also the making of the movie. Cultures are merging and dissolving into some global greyness. Language too seems to moving towards variations on words you can include in English. So how exciting to see the director struggling with 37 sheep words. But I do hope that Ben Hopkins doesn't repeat the theme with a trip to explore the merging worlds of Eskimo peoples ( Inuuit is out of favour isn't it?) because I've yet to see a film from that white out world where subtitles work.