Daughter of Genghis is a documentary that spends seven years with a mother and son but the character arc it captures is so compelling, it could not have been better paced if it were fiction.
She calls herself Gerel. She works as a Mongolian nationalist fighting against China’s influence over her culture. On the surface, her anti-imperialist stance seems noble enough, but she chooses to pursue her cause by breaking into illegal massage parlors in Ulaanbaatar and shaming sex workers. What’s more shocking about this film than anything else may be the access granted by directors Kristoffer Juel Poulsen and Christian Als to these candid moments.
The swastika is used as a symbol for Gerel’s group supposedly because she wants to take back this sign of strength and good luck from the Nazis but everything she says about protecting the purity of Mongol blood sounds uncomfortably close to Nazi ideology. She worships Genghis Khan as an embodiment of Mongolian power while conveniently forgetting that he also represents exactly the sort of imperialism she protests against.
During her campaigns, Gerel often leaves behind young son Temuulen, abandoning him for days on end or even riding off into the desert on horseback without him (the latter is one of many harrowing scenes). Her own childhood was marked by abandonment and loss, and now history repeats itself in her parenting.
To call her flawed would be an understatement but each time the film jumps forward several years at once, we see just how much this woman has grown. She becomes increasingly self-aware about what’s wrong with her thinking, she recognizes that rage isn’t all there is behind it but grief too.
And then there’s Temuulen himself what a sweet kid. He talks like a little philosopher in training, one who at another point informs his mother that because they both know different people who know other people etc., they must be friends with everyone in the world. It’s a profound statement and also just plain cute something we could all stand to realize.
Like much of Daughter of Genghis that makes you cry, Temuulen’s spontaneous remarks could not have been written better by some Hollywood screenwriter’s room. What this movie shows is that no matter how lost we get in life, there is always room for growth.
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