Beautiful award winning Mongolian movie “The Cave of the Yellow Dog” (2005) directed by Byambasuren Davaa and starring Batchuluun Urjindorj, Buyandulam Daramdadi, Nansal Batchuluun among others.

The story is of a simple Mongolian family living off the land with goats, sheep, horses etc. They live in a valley which is known to be flocked by wolves.

The father (Batchuluun Urjindorj) is worried that wolves might attack their herd, already he has lost two sheep. They are finding it difficult to survive off the land.

While the father goes to town to sell the pelts of the sheep killed by the wolves, young Nansal is asked to guard the sheep flock. She wanders and finds a dog in a cave. She brings the dog to the home.

There is a superstition that the dog was left in a cave to enable the daughter of a man to survive some illness, so there is a bad omen attached to it. The family dismantle their home and belongings and prepare to move out.

The dog is tied to a post and after some time they realise that their young son is not to be seen. The father immediately rushes back to find his son walking towards a wake of vultures when the dogs somehow unties itself and rushes towards the vultures scaring them away.

There is a twin moral to the story — one where the father tells Nansal that you cannot have everything that you see, and an old lady asks Nansal to balance a grain of rice on a needle point, meaning that everything is not possible to achive.

At another level, it seeks to destroy the superstition when the dog is united with the family on its way out. Beautiful location, soul stirring music, superb cinematography all make this a beautiful movie to watch. IMDB 7/10