Kazakh movie Tulpan features what must be the best lurking-camel sequence in the history of cinema. It’s one of several scenes — including also a much-talked-about live sheep birthing — that make one wonder how director Sergei Dvortsevoy and his cinematographer Joly Dylewska achieved their remarkable multi-species choreography. The physical, mobile long takes suggest careful planning, yet also seem attuned to unexpected climatic swings — and there are plenty of those in the arid, windswept flats of Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe.

Dvortsevoy’s professional persistence in the face of daunting conditions finds its narrative analogue in the efforts of goofy, big-eared sailor Asa (Asat Kunchinchireko) to master the same landscape. Set on becoming a shepherd, Asa suffers not only job-related setbacks (a mysterious illness has swept his brother-in-law’s flock) but also repeated rejections from the region’s only eligible bachelorette. (He also has to put up with the intrusions of his Boney M–loving buddy.) Tulpan is being sold as a charming fable and it hits those marks well enough, but it’s far more serious than that. By endeavoring to put a way of life on screen in a manner that transcends either simple exoticization or dull ethnographic earnestness, it emerges as something rare and truly lovely: a buoyant comedy of survival.

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