Here is a film with serious technical and narrative flaws that can easily be forgiven because the movie gives us a wondrous gaze into a stupendous, exotic world, stretching far beyond what we have known or seen before.
This is a docudrama based on facts about people who live on a Tibetan plain four miles high which shelters Tibetan antelope, a species that had been threatened with extinction in recent years because of aggressive poaching to harvest highly prized pelts. Poaching became a serious problem here in about 1985. After years of witnessing declining herds, the native people in the region in 1993 took matters into their own hands, forming their own mountain patrol to interdict poaching.
The patrol served this goal admirably for a few short years, until 1996, when the increasing hardships of sustaining these efforts coincided with a government decision to declare the plain a wildlife preserve. The patrol was disbanded and, since then, the numbers of antelope have gradually increased, up to 30,000 or more at the time this film was made.
The story is a dramatic reenactment of events presumably typical of the mountain patrol period (1993-96). Captain Ritai is about to lead a monthly tour of the region, a caravan of three SUVs transporting about 10 heavily armed men, and, this time, also a journalist, Gayu, from Bejing, who is accepted by the men because his father is Tibetan.
Besides the vast flat windswept snowy plain itself, and the massive mountains that border it in the distance, we witness evidence of wholesale slaughtering of antelope (one scene shows the vulture-cleaned carcasses of over 400), armed clashes with poachers, several shooting deaths and injuries, severe cases of pulmonary edema from exertion during chases, and a death when quicksand entraps one of Ritai's men.
The story, which begins strongly enough with the shooting of a patrol member by poachers, gradually loses the traction of credibility as Ritai seems to abandon any semblance of good judgment, pursuing the leaders of the poacher gang even as his supplies of food and fuel dwindle to the danger point, and attrition of his team from illness and injury mounts. So the story goes, the journalist Gayu was the only survivor of this particular patrol, and his subsequent stories published in the nation's capital were influential in bringing about government action to establish the preserve.
Anyone with a thirst for knowing more about extraordinary and inaccessible cultures should rush to see this film, flawed though it is. You will see the reverence for life of these people, who take the time even to pile up hundreds of antelope carcasses to burn in a funeral pyre. You see the tender manner in which these courageous men embrace, knowing that the rigors of their mission may mean death before another meeting. You enter a remote brothel of the sort established in Tibet only recently as a byproduct of Chinese occupation. You discover that the men must pay dearly in cash to obtain emergency medical aid for patrol members who are ill. And there's more.
Kekexili, by the way, means beautiful mountains and girls, we and the journalist Gayu are told. My grade: B 6/10.
This is a docudrama based on facts about people who live on a Tibetan plain four miles high which shelters Tibetan antelope, a species that had been threatened with extinction in recent years because of aggressive poaching to harvest highly prized pelts. Poaching became a serious problem here in about 1985. After years of witnessing declining herds, the native people in the region in 1993 took matters into their own hands, forming their own mountain patrol to interdict poaching.
The patrol served this goal admirably for a few short years, until 1996, when the increasing hardships of sustaining these efforts coincided with a government decision to declare the plain a wildlife preserve. The patrol was disbanded and, since then, the numbers of antelope have gradually increased, up to 30,000 or more at the time this film was made.
The story is a dramatic reenactment of events presumably typical of the mountain patrol period (1993-96). Captain Ritai is about to lead a monthly tour of the region, a caravan of three SUVs transporting about 10 heavily armed men, and, this time, also a journalist, Gayu, from Bejing, who is accepted by the men because his father is Tibetan.
Besides the vast flat windswept snowy plain itself, and the massive mountains that border it in the distance, we witness evidence of wholesale slaughtering of antelope (one scene shows the vulture-cleaned carcasses of over 400), armed clashes with poachers, several shooting deaths and injuries, severe cases of pulmonary edema from exertion during chases, and a death when quicksand entraps one of Ritai's men.
The story, which begins strongly enough with the shooting of a patrol member by poachers, gradually loses the traction of credibility as Ritai seems to abandon any semblance of good judgment, pursuing the leaders of the poacher gang even as his supplies of food and fuel dwindle to the danger point, and attrition of his team from illness and injury mounts. So the story goes, the journalist Gayu was the only survivor of this particular patrol, and his subsequent stories published in the nation's capital were influential in bringing about government action to establish the preserve.
Anyone with a thirst for knowing more about extraordinary and inaccessible cultures should rush to see this film, flawed though it is. You will see the reverence for life of these people, who take the time even to pile up hundreds of antelope carcasses to burn in a funeral pyre. You see the tender manner in which these courageous men embrace, knowing that the rigors of their mission may mean death before another meeting. You enter a remote brothel of the sort established in Tibet only recently as a byproduct of Chinese occupation. You discover that the men must pay dearly in cash to obtain emergency medical aid for patrol members who are ill. And there's more.
Kekexili, by the way, means beautiful mountains and girls, we and the journalist Gayu are told. My grade: B 6/10.