Comment on the Documentary Coniferous Forest —— The Northern Forest of Mongolia

This afternoon, I listened to a documentary about "primitive tribes" with my friends. The protagonist is Hamid sardar Afkami, a slightly fat middle-aged man. At first, I saw that he had a quiet characteristic. He didn't want to talk much for a few minutes while waiting for more viewers to arrive at the sharing venue. He would rather show a documentary and let the work speak for itself. Because the film has no Chinese subtitles, I can't accurately understand all the ideas that the film wants to convey at the first time, but I think a good film is * * *. As the picture progressed, the first question that came to my mind was: "What is the wildness of life? Savage or survival? Is it natural growth or destructive power? How can human resilience survive in such a difficult environment (snowstorm/water shortage/desertification)? With the change of spring, summer, autumn and winter, nomadic people imitate the sound of animals as the echo of nature and imitate birds flapping their wings to entertain themselves.

Hamid sardar-Afkami was called "Dr. Harvard" by the media. He is also a communication major and has a good control over the personal brand image of the Internet. The basic search will all appear in the selected photos, and the overlap of search keywords is quite high. Friends who are interested in his photography can click here (photography /LinkedIn profile/media report). Today's movie is called Coniferous Forest-the Northern Forest of Mongolia. At present, the source of the film for live broadcast has not been found on the Internet. It is estimated that it has just been edited and I will visit various film festivals in various countries. After these announcements, you should see them online.

Activity sharing is from 2 to 5. In addition to the screening time of about 60 minutes, there are two interactive question and answer sessions. Of course, your questions vary in quality, but the answers are enlightening. After the first interactive session, the director Hamid Sardar-Afkhami introduced the "geographical situation" and basic information of the shooting scene in the form of PPT. On the way out of the meeting, I was thinking, should I introduce this person to you? Or, after watching this film and listening to the personal experience of the sharing meeting? A good documentary is an environment (context) that provides concrete thinking. The documentary director doesn't want to have a definite solution, but hopes to bring discussion and minority attention (not even public attention). As he himself said, he should record the disappearing culture as much as possible and let more people know that a group of people on our planet once lived in such a state of life.

Such people, because they found their second hometown (nomadic area in outer Mongolia), stuck their lives on the last nomadic people in the world. For him personally, 15 years' trip to the United States and Outer Mongolia is no longer a purely academic research purpose. This is his life, his life, his soul. He said: "There is a clever relationship between academic research and art", and he upholds the aesthetics of scientific research. An audience friend asked, "Do you look at this special crowd from the perspective of anthropologists? We always think that we can easily contact or ask other people's souls, which is extremely impolite.

One of the shared photos moved me very much. It is he who lives with his son and local children. What's the story in front of this photo? Are you curious? At least I'm curious. The life he experienced for his son changed greatly because of the different venues; At least, it will be very different from children growing up in American cities. His children learned that "reindeer's feet are different from horses'. Reindeer are more suitable for walking in swamps and can walk faster than horses. " And this knowledge of life can't be adapted in the city. Really, this knowledge can't be exchanged for money in the city. Is this a collision between two worlds and an inevitable conflict across the border?

The director spent a lot of PPT talking about "the relationship between man and deer" It should be said that all the tribes he cares about in the past fifteen years have a close relationship with animals. For deer worship tribes who bring people to the spiritual world and depict important events with deer figures, one person and one deer is their totem elk belief. When a child is sick, adults will associate the child with one of the specific deer. From then on, this deer is the patron saint of this child. Wherever he goes, he will walk with this deer until he dies. Reminds me that there are also fairy tales of nine-color deer in Dunhuang civilization, so is the relationship between man and deer a coincidence in primitive civilizations in different regions?

Commercial hunters try to reduce the number of wild animals. Although the government explicitly prohibits malicious hunting, many illegal hunters still take risks to hunt because of human greed and the demand of capital market. When the balance of the animal kingdom is broken, there are fewer sheep that wolves can eat in the biological chain, and wolves will attack the sheep raised by human nomads; Grassland desertification. Year after year of nomadism has not completely restored to natural growth, and black goats will be uprooted if they eat grass. As a result, there are more and more tenacious black goats, fewer and fewer gentle white sheep, and the grassland resources are thin. Winter is not the most difficult time for herders. Spring has come, and lambs have to be fed, but there is not enough grass, and a large number of lambs will die before they grow up. Nomads, how do they give the next generation the ability to survive on the grassland? Should we educate them to live in nature or abandon the grassland and move to the city to live a material life below the horizon? Every day, every season and every year, the psychological conflict between internal and external attacks challenges the tenacity of nomadic people. The director mentioned that the land is becoming more and more barren. How should humans continue? Nature is no longer a treasure house of human dreams. In ancient times, everyone was a part of nature. In today's society, everyone wants to ask for useful parts of nature. We try to ask ourselves: Is my awe of nature still there? Are we all too far away from nature?

"My teacher once told me that we don't want to collect other people's stories. When you stay in one place for a long time, you will become a successful ethnologist until one day you can sit around the fire with them and talk about these experiences and become a member of the story. " Simple observation and research are cool bystanders. When you spend time with them, they will say what they don't want to say to others. "I will go there (Outer Mongolia), hoping to find my soul. But are they slowly losing their souls? There, it seems that every event makes sense. What animals pass by you, what forests we walk through today, and whether we will meet water tomorrow. Children of nomadic people will interpret these natural signals from an early age, and how to interpret these signals also represents how they will continue to survive.

At the end of the documentary, a little boy asked his grandfather: Is the wolf an angel or a demon? Grandpa said: wolves will grow, just like people. If this is meaningful, what kind of values are we willing to choose? Aggressive exponential growth or sustainable smooth cycle?