An Interview with the creators of Khadak

Below is a great article on Khadak, written by Laurence Lerman, just popped on Video Business. I have copied it here because it really does give a good understanding of the film. After the jump there's a link to an interview the filmmakers did with Indiewire last year.

Just a Mongolian Love Song
February 28, 2008

A singular foreign language entry--and arguably the most “foreign” of foreign films we’ve seen so far this year--Lifesize Entertainment’s Khadak (available on March 4) is a film that was shot and set in Mongolia (and the film’s spoken language is Mongolian). It tells an epic tale of the young nomadic shepherd Bagi, whose destiny dictates that he become a shaman. A plague strikes the animals of the land, which puts a dent in his plans, but it also leads him to meeting a beautiful singer (and thief!) and discovering that the plague was a government lie created to eradicate nomadism. The nomad and the singer incite a revolution wherein Bagi discovers that he really may have mystical powers…

It’s a fascinating story, but no more intriguing then the story behind the two Western filmmakers who made the film. Jessica Woodworth, originally from Washington D.C., and Peter Brosens, a cultural anthropologist who

The way Woodworth told the story in a fascinating interview with indieWIRE last fall (http://www.indiewire.com/people/2007/10/indiewire_inter_115.html ), it was she and Brosen's meeting, marriage and an aborted documentary that formed the genesis of Khadak:

“We were two married in Germany in 2000. Together, we started researching a documentary about aviation and socialism in Mongolia. We both became uneasy about creating a 56-minute [film] deliverable for public TV featuring these noble and faded pilots we were meeting. We both had very simply lost our will to make documentaries. So we returned to Belgium from our three–month documentary research trip with the seed of Khadak already mind."

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