Buddhist Beats: on the road with Mongolian Bling

An excerpt. The full piece is live at the link below.

What do we know about Mongolia? It’s cold. People are nomads and live in large, round tents called yurts. Also something about rare wild horses. And indeed, this is – more or less – how independent documentary Mongolian Bling starts: out on the steppe, with footage of a man on horseback lassoing another horse.

But then we cut to a modern city – Ulaanbaatar – a wild contrast of grey, post-Soviet architecture interspersed with modern buildings and shops like anywhere else. Sure, a caption announces the outside temperature is minus 20-something Celsius, but the collection of young Mongolians we meet and get to know over the next 90 minutes only care about one thing: hip hop.

This is the startling premise of this surprisingly deep and detailed look at the lives of a bunch of people living near the top of the world. Mongolian Bling is an exercise in artful minimalism: there’s no narration and barely a single word of English spoken. There’s no map, a few minutes of archival footage, and only two “soundscapes” – where environmental sounds are edited together to create a hip-hop style beat – to break the flow. It’s completely engrossing.