Tuya's Marriage

This is an exotic film that recalls other indigenous Mongolian tales by Byambasuren Davaa such as The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003) or The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005). It also has much in common with the Tibetan film Himalaya (1999) and rural Iranian cinema. The story, like that in each of these other films, is very simple - a woman's husband is incapacitated and she seeks a new man who will support the old.

The cinematography is beautiful with the harshness of the inner Mongolian landscape captured aesthetically. Dialogue is sparse, and the film is very observational, documenting a way of life that is gradually receding into the past. The herding and riding of animals, the digging of wells, the visits from potential suitors and other aspects of rural life are nicely captured, and contrast against the oncoming tide of modernity.

Thematically, the film has more in common with Breaking the Waves (1996), my favourite Lars von Trier film. There is both humour and heartbreak as the story unfolds. I didn't find the film quite as effective as Weeping Camel but a nice bit of cultural diversity that's worth seeing.

This movie makes me think about myself: compare the living conditions between Mongolia and us, I definitely think I am lucky, and thanks to my family. In Mongolia, the child needs to do a lot of work that I did not even try before, and they are lacking water resource. Also, their transportation is poor. Tuya's Marriage also shows their attitude of living, they do not give up, they still want to stay at their home instead of going to the city. Tuya is a strong woman, his husband is paralytic, so she needs to take care of her family by herself; she goes thousands of miles to get water and depasture sheeps every day, even she has physical problems. She divorced her husband in order to give a better condition to her family, she says everyone wants to marry me needs also need to support her ex-husband. The favorite scene in this movie is her child had been trapped in a wolf attack, she comes and says" do not worry, if these wolves attack you, I will eat them and leave these sheep here, I am gonna take you home". On this movie, I see a great mom, wife and a hot heart person.

Tuya' marriage is among one of the most successful attempts by China's sixth-generation directors to make a good film. Other equally successful ones included the Beijing Bicycle, the Little Red Flowers, etc, which were all made by film directors not quite familiar to Western viewers --- at least not as known as big names like Zhang Yimou.

The film is so real to life and depicts the life on the vast lands of Inner Mongolia so well, that it reminds me of my piecemeal impressions gathered during my trip to Inner Mongolia six years ago --- people were impoverished but so kind, materially backward but spiritually advanced, and the traditional way of life is preserved well.

Yu Nan's performance is really amazing. The plot is so moving and touching that at some points I felt so much involved as to worry about Sengge's death through drilling.

This is a new kind of experience even for Han Chinese to learn about the Mongolian life, and I hope it can be the same kind of revealing experience for audience in the West to understand the ethnic diversity in China --- Mongolians live harmoniously with Han Chinese in the same country called "China", just as it is the case with the other 55 minorities, including Tibetans.

In a nutshell --- Tuya's Marriage indeed deserves the Golden Bear at Berlinale, be it in essence or in name.

Wang Quanan's fascinating film "Tuya's Marriage" is a quietly powerful story of female reverence, shot on location against the arresting landscapes of deepest Mongolia, with its immensely graceful protagonist being the prepossessing shepherdess Tuya (Nan Yu), caught between a marital loophole and the tightening grip of subsistence when she's forced to look for a new husband willing to take care of her young children and an invalid ex-husband. Austere and gorgeous, Wang's observations on the encroaching capitalism in a rural land so entrenched in tradition and its collective, scuttles from background to foreground when Tuya explores her options and their economic viability. Wisely eschewing a formal romanticism of the arena, Wang takes us deeper into the all-encompassing humanism of the film, when he chooses a cogitative docu-drama approach to the film, a striking reminder that a film's aesthetics are part of its ethos and message. Triumphing at the 2007 Berlinale with the festival's top prize, Wang delivers a film so complex and rich that it finds its tracts in the human capacity for compassion and sorrow.

almost documentary. a woman in Inner Mongolia. her family. and her husband. a delicate situation. and one option. nothing else. result - a film about basic things in a isolated space. taste of sand and dust. a silent heroic existence. beauty of images. drops of humor. and sensation of a lot of pictures by strangers. very familiar pictures. a warm feeling, mixture of compassion and curiosity. a border film between testimony and art product. because the story is present in many movies from East. because the place, language or details are only pieces of a large arena.after its end, the flavor of savage beauty remains in memory. more than social postcard, it is trip in forms of human meetings as form of profound happiness.