The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)

This semi-documentary was made by a bunch of German film students and focuses on an extended Mongolian family living in the Gobi Desert and their attempts to help the most-recent camel colt who has been rejected by his mother.  I think the film was meant to be charming, but while the look it afforded at another way of life was not without interest, I think the story was too "staged" in the tradition of "Nanook of the North" to really warm one's heart.  The film-makers seem so enamoured of every facet of the family's life that the coherence of the tale is lost. The most interesting part to me since I find baby camels resistible was the inroads being made by so-called civilization into what was once a simple life--from the plastic dust-brush used to sweep the yurt through the clothing with logos to the television set the family had acquired at the end (no doubt a gift from the Germans).