If Walt Disney were alive, he'd probably be sick with envy that he didn't hear the story of the weeping camel first. This enchanting documentary about a baby camel and the mother who rejects him after a difficult birth tugs at the heart strings as firmly as Bambi did, but then loosens them for a sweetly gratifying reunion that Bambi won't have with his mother until he's mounted beside her over the fireplace.

To be fair, few have heard of weeping camels outside Mongolia, where nomadic tribes tend to camels using ancient rituals just as they're outfitting their tents with satellite TV. The clash of old- and new-world cultures depicted in The Story of the Weeping Camel also, in a way, brought the film into being. Co-director Byambasuren Davaa came from Mongolia to attend film school in Munich, where she befriended Italian student Luigi Falorni and told him about a ritual she'd seen in a documentary as a child. Falorni was instantly hooked.

"She told me this strange story about a mother camel rejecting her child and the nomads playing and singing to her until she cries and accepts it again," he says in an interview at the Miami International Film Festival in January, where the film won Best Documentary. "I was searching for a subject for my graduation film, and it occurred to me right away that this story [has] a universal reach that goes far beyond camel tears or the exotic, nomadic life."

Falorni and Davaa travelled to the Gobi Desert in early 2002 looking for a family of shepherds to feature in their film, which Falorni describes as a "narrative documentary" since they planned the story in advance rather than letting it emerge during shooting. After finding a multi-generational family with a large herd of pregnant camels (maximizing the odds that one would reject her calf), the filmmakers returned with their tiny crew during the birthing season. "It could as well have gone wrong -- or rather gone right -- with every camel," Falorni says of their risky venture. "If we hadn't gotten the story we wanted, we probably would've gone home without a film and told our financiers, 'Sorry, we made a hole in water,' as we say in Italy."

Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for a rare white calf the herders named Botok, the last delivery was painful, and the mother rejected Botok. "After a few days, I thought, 'This is not good. She really doesn't want him.' I felt responsible because I'd wanted it so bad," Falorni says.

As they waited for the shepherds to fetch a musician from town for the ritual, he and Davaa captured delightful (if dawdling) scenes of family life. The kids are curious but also easily bored, such as when they shush their great-grandfather because he's telling a story they've heard before.

These scenes weren't scripted, but they didn't always happen spontaneously. Falorni says that because he was shooting on film instead of digital video, he often had to ask the family to wait for him. The animals weren't as accommodating. "You cannot direct a camel," Falorni says.

Botok is a pretty natural talent, though. His cries are so gut-wrenching that you wonder whether the filmmakers prolonged his estrangement for maximum emotional effect. Falorni says the shepherds were the slowpokes, not him. "We knew that they were going to do the ritual 'cause we talked to them about it during research. But a rather long time elapsed before they actually did. And the whole time they were feeding the calf with milk taken from his mother, going back and forth, and the little one was weeping because he didn't want just milk, he also wanted some contact with his mother. I was like, 'Come on, go get the musician!'"

When the ritual finally occurs, it's filled with suspense -- not over whether it'll work (it's a family film, after all) but over why it works. Falorni himself is still in the dark.

"Maybe why I never questioned it is, it seems so natural. When you spend time with [the nomads], singing and playing music is such a normal part of their life." He speculates that the ritual uses sounds organic to the environment to help the mother trust the herders.

Falorni's trust in magic over science has paid off handsomely. He's now finished film school and promoting the doc at various festivals. And what did his teachers think of his graduation project? "I got an A," he laughs.

FROM THE CAMEL'S MOUTH

Magic schmagic. Falorni might not be curious why the ritual works, but I was, so I hunted for camel experts online and emailed Ahmed Tibary, Associate Professor of Theriogenology at Washington State University after finding articles he'd written about the neonatal care of camels.

I was surprised when Tibary replied that he'd never heard of the ritual. He described factors that cause a dam (mother camel) to reject her calf, which ironically include too much manipulation of the herd by humans. He also explained that a camel's long eyelashes, well-developed third eyelid and active lacrimal glands are just there to help the animal survive sandstorms.

Then Tibary added, "Although these secretions are tears and as such they fulfill a specific physiological function, I do not believe this should be calling weeping. The idea that camels 'weep' if mistreated is very common in Arabia and North Africa. It is nice to humanize animal behaviour because it does [encourage] a sense a responsibility on how we treat animals but again I do not believe that this is sentimental weeping."