The Eagle Huntress
Directed by: Otto Bell
Starring: Aisholpan - Narrated by: Daisy Ridley
Documentary/Adventure/Family - 87 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 25 Oct 2016
Starring: Aisholpan - Narrated by: Daisy Ridley
Documentary/Adventure/Family - 87 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 25 Oct 2016
Every year, thousands of American hunters descend upon the woodlands near their homes trash talking about the size of the elk they are going to bag this year. The more hearty of those hunters will use bow and arrows instead of rifles to fell their prey. What if they learned a 13 year old girl in Mongolia had it over all of them? She kills foxes with her Golden Eagle. Not so much a story about the ins and outs of hunting with birds of prey latched onto your arm, The Eagle Huntress is a documentary about shattering that final glass ceiling, a girl tries to break into the insular, patriarchal society of eagle hunters.
Aisholpan is a pubescent girl living in the barren, wind-swept Asian steppe of northwestern Mongolia. Her people are part of the Kazakh minority and her family is one of the very few still considered nomads. They live in a ger, like a yurt, in the warmer months, and huddle in a stone house during the winter. Aisholpan is only home on the weekends because school is so far away, commuting is impossible. She lives in a Soviet-style, cement barracks on the school grounds.
Aisholpan is a pubescent girl living in the barren, wind-swept Asian steppe of northwestern Mongolia. Her people are part of the Kazakh minority and her family is one of the very few still considered nomads. They live in a ger, like a yurt, in the warmer months, and huddle in a stone house during the winter. Aisholpan is only home on the weekends because school is so far away, commuting is impossible. She lives in a Soviet-style, cement barracks on the school grounds.
Instead of preparing herself for what society expects of her, meaning marriage, children, and cooking, Aisholpan spent her childhood keenly observing her father, a champion eagle hunter. It’s not enough to venture out into the snow-capped mountains to hunt, serious birders also compete at the annual Golden Eagle Festival to see whose bird obeys them the best, flies the fastest, and who wears the finest bespoke hunting threads. Not once deterring Aisholpan's unorthodox plan, her father still seeks the blessing of the local eagle chieftain before diving in headfirst.
However, Aisholpan must aquire her own bird. In a serendipitous moment for director Otto Bell, he arrived to film Aisholpan and her family the day before she was to trek out with her father and obtain a fledgling eagle from a nest high up a steep and craggy hill. In a scene reminiscent of Blackfish, where fishermen captured baby orcas while you listen to mama orca scream her head off in the distance, Aisholpan rapels down the side of a cliff to snatch a baby eagle while it’s mother circles overhead waiting for a chance to introduce Aisholpan the bird-napper to a sharp talon or three.
Armed with her new bird, we watch Aisholpan bond with it, train it to catch fleeing game, and prepare for the festival. The most amusing part of The Eagle Huntress is a succession of tightly edited interviews with the eagle elders, very old men who all spout a variation of the party line, “Girls cannot hunt with eagles; they are too weak, frail, and besides, the mountains are too cold for them.” The festival crowd feels differently; however, as they at first smirk at the girl among men and then cheer ecstatically at her performance.
Filming it all on the fly (pardon the pun) with cameras near, far, above, and below, Bell even has one tied on to the eagle for the bird’s eye view. Once he obtained adequate funding, Bell took advantage of the monetary opportunities and filmed the Mongolian Altai mountains from the air. These panoramic shots, of which there are plenty, shows how empty and forbidding it is in that part of the world. Hunting with a rifle would be a pain in the neck out there, let alone with a bird.
There are some Discovery Channel moments in the film where half the audience may be rooting for the soon to be victim animal against the bird but Bell edits just enough where the little kids won’t be too upset when Mr. Fox becomes Mr. Lunch. Championed back home by the likes of Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), who found the money for Bell when he saw the initial footage, and narrated by Star Wars heroine herself, Daisy Ridley, The Eagle Huntress is for all those girls out there who are tired of telling everyone they can do anything that boys can do. Aisholpan proves she can handle and hunt with an eagle with the best of them, but she does take some time to paint her fingernails pink before heading out into the wasteland.
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