The Eagle Huntress

Not only does this film trace the remarkable achievements of the teenage girl Aisholpan who handles very major challenges in achieving the goal of becoming the first female ever to become a successful hunter using the eaglet she has trained from a nestling, but it also portrays the life of Kazakh nomadic herders in the Altai region of Mongolia better than any of the other Mongolian herder films I have seen (even the Weeping Camel, which was also outstanding). I have travelled in this area of Mongolia and the adjacent part of Xinjiang in China - it is a very tough environment for the people who live there, and making such a technically difficult film must have been extraordinarily challenging. The scenes where Aisholpan captures her eaglet and where the eagle catches its first fox are breathtaking, and the scenes showing the interactions among these very traditional people of the Altai region are so totally realistic the film makers must have established very good relationships with them first.

What can I say more than the reviewer/user prior? This is truly a wonderful film. I saw it on the last day of our International Film Festival and somehow the word must have 'got around' as the cinema was well filled! As the previous writer noted, the relationship between the locals and the film-makers must have been excellent. I noted carefully the credits on its conclusion and most seem to be Euro/Anglo names - again interesting, that alone adds credit.

The blurbs prior made much of the negative attitudes of the traditional people, but a tremendous joy of this film is that the father was totally behind and with his 13-yr old all the way. The empathy and shared loved of the task and each other was greatly inspiring. He was a tremendous teacher. The context of the piece with its daily and dramatic challenges with almost none of 1st World intervention (okay - they had trucks, wore jeans, sweat-shirts etc at the school, but today nowhere in the world is cut off from some 'western' features, is it?) I think one class shown was in beginner English.

A viewer should not miss the deep but never forced spiritual/religious impetus. Is this part of world of 'old Islam' does anyone know?

Filmed in a remote part of Western Mongolia, this beautifully shot film chronicles the coming of age of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old girl who wants to become an Eagle Hunter like her dad, grandfather, and all male ancestors stretching back 12 generations. Her dad is all for it (quite a modern attitude, as it turns out) but custom dictates that eagle hunting (that's hunting with eagles, not hunting for eagles) is a male undertaking. Girls are too weak, fragile, get cold, etc. The usual explanations why a female can't do what a male does. However, Aisholpan is fearless. With dad's help, she climbs up and down a mountain to trap her own eaglet just before it's old enough to fly away from her. She trains it to hunt with humans. She competes in the local eagle-hunter festival in Ölgii (signage in the film is in Russian and English). All of this takes place surrounded by the beautiful but bleak mountains of the Mongolia steppe, carefully captured on film. (Looks a lot like Death Valley in winter to me.) These people are heroic just going about a nomad's daily subsistence life that's obviously hundreds or thousands of years old but adapted to modern times with down parkas, trucks, and motorcycles. Their lives are both far removed and yet arrestingly similar to Western life (minus the Starbucks). They care for their kids, drive, go to school, listen to the news on the radio, read by electricity stored from a solar array set up on a metal pole and a wooden stick.

The point: This movie captures a mostly pre-industrial society coping with 21st-century norms in a modern world, and with little to no extra effort as portrayed in this movie. For example, the film's Web page on Sony Pictures' site shows Aisholpan with a Go Pro Hero action camera strapped to her head, which explains where some of the film footage came from.

Billed as a documentary, we presumably see things as they happened. I couldn't say but nothing much goes wrong in this movie. Mostly, things go very right and the narrative just moves forward. Nevertheless, I was always cheering for Aisholpan, because she's a most worthy heroine.

"It's not a choice, it's a calling that has to be in your blood." Aisholpan's father, Nurgaiv.

Rarely does a documentary tell it like it is; manipulative docs sometimes embellish with contrived conflicts or outrageously obvious re-creations. The Eagle Huntress needs no phony clashes or extensive re-enactments, for its hero is 13 year old Aisholpan, from Asia's Altai Mountains, the first female Kazakh in twelve generations to be a bona fide eagle huntress.

The Eagle Huntress is so beautifully shot you'd almost book passage to visit this isolated world in Mongolia by the China border. Director Otto Bell said, "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there." The air and sky are clear like we in the city have never seen, and the nomadic tribe that gives us Aisolpan is so loving and innocent as to make us wonder what our modern technology has taken from us.

I guess I am most impressed that the modern notion of female empowerment is played without histrionics among elders who question her fitness as a woman to compete in the annual Golden Eagle Festival. Aisholpan is the perfect model for early teen film goers: fresh faced, wide smiled, and ready for challenges. Director Otto Bell lets the male power gently give in to the age of feminism without acting like stupid old guys.

The Eagle Huntress works not just as a tract supporting the new woman but also as a treatise on simple, authentic life style where what one does trumps what one says. By the way, she's a perfect role model because she lacks the self-absorbed qualities of today's female heroes.

It's beautiful and uplifting in the most honest way a doc can be.

Despite the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of this documentary (notably being omitted from the Oscar nominations in its respective category, while still being tipped as a potential front runner), The Eagle Huntress is a decent release that follows the story of (supposedly) the first eagle huntress in Asia, Aisholpan Nurgaiv. Nurgaiv is decidedly keen on entering a local eagle hunting festival at aged 13, before then venturing out into the mountains to become a fully-fledged eagle huntress.

Being an eagle huntress entails training a three-month-old eaglet (after taking it from its nest that is), with the eventual outcome of being able to successfully hunt with it, before letting it go after seven years to complete the "circle of life". 

Undeniably, this is a challenging way of life that requires hard work and years to master. Yet the film portrays Aisholpan in a light that makes it feel like she is rather too conveniently good at the work and that she was always capable of achieving the end goal, thus it struggles to truly resonate when the all-important pinnacle moments arrive. Whilst it is fair to assume Aisholpan possesses some natural talent, we rarely see her fail or train with negative outcomes. Exploring this side would certainly have made the film more relatable, and although Aisholpan is indeed personable, and there are some moments with a heartening timbre, it is unrealistic to think she didn't have much of a challenge in her path towards becoming the first eagle huntress. That is, it is unrealistic to think that there were no other challenges, disregarding the challenge of gender. It is established that eagle hunting is very much a male profession, an aspect battled with constantly throughout the film, which even manages to have comedic impact at times, but unfortunately this gets  increasingly repetitive by the end and is not seen to contribute towards any definitive conclusion. 

That said, it is wonderful to watch Aisholpan and her father endeavour through the magnificent landscapes of Asia, as it is a superbly filmed documentary. This is most definitively one of the film's strongest attributes, as it feels often that it relies very much on nature to tell the story. Arguably it gets away with this, as the story is easy to follow, yet  largely inconsequential; as part of western society, it is pre-determined exactly what we are meant to think about Aisholpan's ambitions. While on the one hand there is an absorbing undertone of female empowerment, there is little else to try and convince us that the conclusion will not be precisely what we expect.

The Eagle Huntress is a visual spectacle, full of emotion yet not as resonant as it  potentially could have been as a short film.