Zoljargal Purevdash’s debut function If Only I Could Hibernate tells the story of a youngster residing within the yurt district of Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, who is set to win a physics competitors and earn a scholarship to college.
But his plans change when his mom takes a job within the countryside and leaves him and his siblings to fend for themselves. Rather than research, he’s compelled to take a dangerous job so he can purchase meals and gas.
“My mum opened a shop in the yurt district when I was teenager and we saw many different kinds of people – some were nomads, some living in difficult situations, some parents buying alcohol for themselves, but no food for their kids, just a few cheap candies,” Purevdash tells Deadline. “Somehow, I always wanted to create something for those innocent little children, to tell them a story that would make them happy, or to give them hope.”
That story ended up being If Only I Could Hibernate, which premieres in Un Certain Regard on Sunday (May 21) as the primary Mongolian movie ever in Cannes Official Selection. The movie not solely explores the function of training as a route out of poverty, however raises questions on the best way to sort out Mongolia’s poisonous air pollution.
The movie is about over winter, and as Purevdash explains, winters don’t come a lot harsher than in Ulaanbaatar, the place temperatures plummet to beneath minus 30 levels and the town is choked in thick smog for months at a time, as greater than half of the inhabitants dwell in yurts with no entry to heating and burn coal to maintain themselves heat.
“As you can see in the movie, the air pollution is crazy in Mongolia,” Purevdash says. “Every winter you have to breath it in, and the kids are also breathing it in, and have heavy metals running through their blood. But the solutions people are coming up with are total nonsense. They’re talking about using refined coal, when they should be installing solar panels.”
After creating the script of If Only I Could Hibernate for a number of years, Purevdash says she was ready by what felt like countless cycles of funding functions for worldwide grants, however had additionally raised some finance from native sources, together with the Swiss Agency For Development and Cooperation in Mongolia and a Mongolian fintech group.
“Every winter, when I couldn’t shoot this film, I fell into a long depression,” she says. “I almost gave up on the project, but thought that if I really believe in this story, I should put it on screen in any form possible. Eventually I called my French producer [Urban Group’s Frederic Corvez] and said I’ve got this crazy idea – I’m just going to shoot with what I have.”
This willpower appears typical of Purevdash, who has written, directed and produced the movie however whose journey into filmmaking was not an easy one. She determined at a younger age that she wished to write down and direct however was afraid to inform her household who wished her to enter a extra typical career.
“We’d watch movies every Saturday night on Mongolian national television – films like Forrest Gump and The Shawshank Redemption, I found them so moving as a teenager,” Purevdash remembers. “There was also a film from Thailand about a trans basketball player. It was the first time I realised you could make the audience totally understand your life and experience through watching a film.”
Like the protagonist in If Only I Could Hibernate, Purevdash additionally excelled at maths and physics and received a scholarship to enter a prestigious highschool. But as a substitute of of pouring over physics books, she joined the varsity’s drama group, then received one other scholarship to review filmmaking at J. F. Oberlin University in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating, she returned to Ulaanbaatar, labored as an assistant director on a number of native movies, then grew to become a mom, which put her filmmaking profession on maintain.
In 2017, she entered an early model of If Only I Could Hibernate to the Berlin movie competition’s Talents Tokyo programme, a lab for Asian filmmakers, and received the Talents Tokyo Award: “That gave me the confidence that I was working on something worthwhile. But I had first timer’s over-excitement and applied to all the international funds way too early,” she remembers. “So I took some time to make three short films and continued working on the script.”
Following her begin at Talents Tokyo, Purevdash developed the challenge by a variety of different labs and co-production markets, together with TorinoFilmLab, Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum and Locarno movie competition’s Open Doors. She met Corvez at Talents Tokyo and alongside the best way additionally met her affiliate producer, Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui, and Mongolian co-producer Batkhishig Sed-Ayushjav. She additionally secured post-production funding from Qatar and France.
While post-production occurred abroad to fulfil funding necessities, the movie went into manufacturing with a completely Mongolian solid and crew. Several crew members have been heading departments for the primary time – the DoP was a stills photographer and the co-producer had a background in documentaries – whereas the solid was largely non-professionals, together with kids who had grown up within the yurt district.
Mongolia does have a neighborhood movie trade, producing round 40-60 movies yr, however Purevdash wished children from the yurt district moderately than skilled little one actors for authenticity: “We did a casting call and I chose kids with characters that were similar to the script. I told them why I wanted to make this film, and these kids are so honest and pure, they can see what’s happening around them, and wanted to help me tell this story.”
She provides that with the mercury plunging to minus 42 levels at one level, extra pampered little one actors won’t have been capable of take care of the shoot: “We had to put the cameras into a warm car every five minutes to stop them freezing. I covered my kids with thick blankets, gave them hot drinks and vitamins and put hot sand in their shoes. I don’t think we could have done it without the kids’ strength and spirit.”
Those children are actually flying into Cannes to stroll the pink carpet on the movie’s premiere in Un Certain Regard on Sunday (May 21). Battsooj Uurtsaikh, Nominjiguur Tsend and Tuguldur Batsaikhan head the solid of the movie, which was produced by Purevdash’s Amygdala Films and Urban Factory Production, with Urban Sales dealing with worldwide distribution.
“I wanted people who breath this air to tell the story with me,” Purevdash says. “Everyone worked really hard on this film and we hope it will make people think about how we can give an equal chance of a good education to every kid.”
See the trailer for If Only I Could Hibernate right here.
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