Öndög
(Öndög)

« What the human eye sees is not always reality. » Among others this statement from the invisible passenger in a car driving through the night across the Mongol steppe, suggests that perception and interpretation sometimes diverge. Yet, the wide angles, regularly sustained by pans moving across the vast semi-arid plains where the film and its plot first seem to take root – however far from us this elsewhere is – appear to hide nothing that we cannot see, cannot recognise. Where then does this feeling of strangeness that pervades and densifies the new film of Wang Quan’an (Tuya’s Marriage, Weaving Girl, Apart Together) comes from ? Landscapes, the nuanced alternation of skies passing from day to night, amateur actors, a woman’s corpse, the slaughter of a lamb, the birth of a calf – Öndög replaces the construction of a credible story with the certainty that, as everything has been there from the dawn of time up to the memory of the bygone dinosaurs, you only need tell this story to make it true. And just as certainly, we could check that the column of smoke rising from the chimney of a yurt is visible from kilometers away. JB