Aoluguya, Aoluguya…
敖魯古雅．敖魯古雅
In the Greater Xing’ an Mountain of northern China, there is a group of people who share their life with the reindeers. These Ewenkis people came from Siberia over three hundred years ago. They have been living in the dense primeval forest and surviving on hunting and raising reindeers in their own traditional way. In 2003, the Reindeer Ewenkis came out of the forest and moved down to the new settlement built by the government. Now with hunting also banned, the Reindeer Ewenkis find themselves in a dilemma. Time is passing… the sounds of deer bells are fading away… Maria Suo, the last chief of the tribe, watches the changing of time helplessly. But does the forest the Ewenkis used to know still belong to them?
Directors
Gu Tao
Gu Tao was born in 1970 in Inner Mongolia, China, at the base of the Great Xingan Mountains. When he was a child, his father was an ethnographer and photographer, and focused his time and energy documenting the nomadic tribes in the mountains near their home. After graduating from the Inner Mongolia School of Art with a major in oil painting, Gu Tao moved to Beijing and started living and working as an artist and conceptual photographer (doing commercial photography to pay the bills). In 2005 he began following in his father’s footsteps, traveling back to the mountains of his hometown to make a documentary about its original residents, the Ewenki people. Gu Tao’s focus, however, was different from his father’s, as he saw a way of life that had been severely limited by governmental intrusion and environmental destruction, since the 1970’s when his father was doing his filming. He has chosen to focus his films on dying traditions and ways of life, and how marginalized groups are adapting to the modern world. As Gu Tao has found his niche…