37 Uses for a Dead Sheep

This film by Ben Hopkins is a semi documentary about the recent life time history of a nomadic tribe the Pamir Kirghiz. Originally from the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia they were forced to migrate from country to country. The film has the Pamir Kirghiz acting out their own tribal history with humour and diffidence and switches between events in the past and events in the making of the film. The older members of the tribe long to return to the mountains where they had eek-ed out an existence in the border lands between Russia, Afghanistan and China.

To survive the oppressions by each totalitarian state they moved from Soviet Union, to Afghanistan, then to Pakistan and finally to Eastern Turkey. In Turkey they have found sanctuary but the cost is to loose their identity. But how does this happen? Go and see the film.

You could say, with predictable wit, that there are 37 films one could see any night so why choose this one? Well, it has humour and respect. It mixes its approach as documentary and also story telling and catches also the making of the movie. Cultures are merging and dissolving into some global greyness. Language too seems to moving towards variations on words you can include in English. So how exciting to see the director struggling with 37 sheep words. But I do hope that Ben Hopkins doesn't repeat the theme with a trip to explore the merging worlds of Eskimo peoples ( Inuuit is out of favour isn't it?) because I've yet to see a film from that white out world where subtitles work.

The most unfortunate thing about this documentary is the title - most people will skip it because it has a silly title, which it has. However, the documentary makes for interesting viewing about a little known culture that will have disappeared within a generation or two.

It is about a little known tribe of nomadic Turkic peoples, the Pamir Kirghiz. Originally they existed in the far North-West mountainous region of what is today Afghanistan, subsisting primarily on their livestock of sheep and yak. The film attempts to tell their story from about the late 19th century up to the present day. How they were forced to move from one region to another due to racial and cultural oppression, especially, and most cruelly, by the Soviets.

Admittedly the reenactments are somewhat amateurish, but they also help explain how the Pamir Kirghiz come to be where they are today.

This is not a big budget documentary, so don't expect professional narration or a well structured historical time-line. It shows a small slice of the (hard) life of these people, soon to be swallowed up by globalization. It would have been even more interesting if the filmmaker had researched further back into the history of these people, but we must accept his limitations and take what we get. For anyone with an interest in history and vanishing culture, this film is certainly worth watching.

As far as I'm concerned, you really can't go wrong with a film about yurts, yogurt, nomadic tribes and the shifting borders of the 'Stans' in Central Asia. I put my pants on one leg at a time.

37 Uses, is not so much Hopkins' film but a collaborative work, made with the Pamir Kirghiz tribe, a splendid historical document. The film begins in the 19th c. with the Super Powers divvying up Central Asia, a region that since the inventions of salt, silk, and opium remains one of the hottest properties on earth. We watch as beautiful nostalgic footage is fabricated through the tribe's reenactment, aided by the expert Kirghiz art direction of Muhammet Ekber Kutlu, son of the last Kirghizian khan, Rahman Qul.

In case you weren't paying attention during Central Asian History, the Pamir Mountains are the North Westernmost range of the Greater Himalaya, but are the feather in the cap of what is now known as 'the Stans'. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Kirghizstan and Kazachstan. Did I forget anyone? It's all about where you think the center of the world is situated, and that is what has been keeping the Kirghizians on the move, beyond their home turf pastures. The Pamir Kirghiz, no strangers to hardship inflicted by Super Powers, have (partially) avoided ethnic cleansing by doing what they do best, being nomadic.

Believe it or not, the Kirghiz people who originated, centuries ago, in Pamir do actually know of 37 uses for a dead sheep. These are regaled to us, periodically, as directors Ben Hopkins and Muhammed Ekber Kutlu - a local man, mix reconstructions of significant events from the recent past with some candidly entertaining interviews with the latest generation as they finally find themselves settled, safely, in Turkey. We start with a graphic that shows just how far these peoples have had to travel as they found themselves driven from their homelands by a succession of Soviet then Chinese communists before temporarily residing in Afghanistan then Pakistan before being offered their current home. It's odd that after all of these existential trials that have decimated the population of both people and livestock it's only now the they face their biggest challenge of all. Sustaining their culture and traditions in the face of an evacuating youth who have or want little truck with the ways of the past. The dramatisations give us some clues as to just how tough these lives must have been at the high altitudes in which they and their herds of yaks thrived - some 12,000 feet up with a mere two months of summer, the winter winds howling; their leather yurts heated only by burning dried dung and soldiers constantly trying to indoctrinate them. It's not hard to see why the current generation see little sentimental in revisiting that subsistence, hand-to-mouth, existence that really does know how to optimise the live-giving resources of their hardy animals. There are plenty of characters here, including one old gent who goes into (frankly unwelcome) detail as to some early Kirghiz dental techniques, and the narrator/director Hopkins provides us with a gently engaging but respectful history of a proud and stoic people who have endured much in the search to remain free. Clearly there is no going home now for these people, but it's astonishing how little bitterness and rancour they seem to have.

I watched this documentary at the International Film Festival in Berlin, where it also won a prize (one of three actually, as can be seen here on IMDb).

The title does suggest what this documentary is about, but that's not entirely true. This is about the Pamir Kirghiz people, who have survived many times, by moving. Which makes them practically homeless, one could say. There is not much to spoil here, but I will leave you at that.

The director also came out, afterwards and answered a few questions. The humour in the film was clearly coming from him, as everyone could see clearly by his answers that he gave!