The Eagle Huntress
The Eagle Huntress is a 2016 internationally co-produced Kazakh-language documentary feature film directed by Otto Bell and narrated by executive producer Daisy Ridley. It follows the story of Aisholpan Nurgaiv, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, as she attempts to become the first female eagle hunter to compete in the Golden Eagle Festival at Ölgii, Mongolia.
Synopsis
The Eagle Huntress follows the story of Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, as she attempts to become the first female eagle hunter to compete in the Eagle Festival at Ulgii, Mongolia, established in 1999. She belongs to a family of nomads who spend their summers in a ger in the Altai Mountains and their winters in a house in town. The men in her family have been eagle hunters for seven generations, and she wants to follow in their footsteps.With her father Nurgaiv's help, she learns how to train golden eagles and then captures and trains her own eaglet. Although she faces some disbelief and opposition within the traditionally male sport, she becomes the first female to enter the competition at the annual Golden Eagle Festival. She ends up winning the competition, and her eaglet breaks a speed record in one of the events.
After the competition, she takes the final step toward becoming an eagle hunter by traveling with her father to the mountains in the winter to hunt foxes, braving snowy conditions and extreme cold. After some initial misses, her eaglet successfully kills its first fox, and she returns home.
Production
The film was directed by Otto Bell and narrated by executive producer Daisy Ridley.The film's dialogue is in Kazakh; the narration is in English.
Music
The film's soundtrack features the original song "Angel by the Wings" by Sia, which was released worldwide on 2 December 2016.Release
The Eagle Huntress premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where it was purchased by Sony Pictures Classics for North and Latin America, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and Asia, and Altitude Film Distribution for the UK. Following the film's premiere, co-executive producer Daisy Ridley agreed to add narration, comprising approximately five minutes' total time in the 87-minute film. Director Otto Bell said of Ridley, "Like so many other theatergoers around the world, I was blown away by Daisy's recent portrayal of an empowered female protagonistReception
The documentary was a New York Times Critics' Pick and an LA Times Critics' Pick. Chief Film Critics at The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, called the film "a bliss out" and "a movie that expands your sense of what is possible", respectively. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 94% approval rating based on 126 reviews with an average rating of 7.41/10. The website's critics consensus states: "Effectively stirring and bolstered by thrilling visuals, The Eagle Huntress uses its heartwarming message to fill up a feature that might have made for an even more powerful short film." Metacritic reports a 72 out of 100 score based on 20 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature but was ultimately not nominated. It was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary.
Criticism
Aisholpan describes the opposition she faced in her own words in the film. Some reviewers and researchers felt that the documentary overstated the amount of opposition Aisholpan faced as a female eagle hunter and that the early promotion of the film included an ethnocentric description of the Kazakh eagle hunting culture as being one of "ingrained misogyny". After historical evidence and facts were published about nomadic steppe women participating in training eagles to hunt from antiquity to the present day, the filmmakers corrected early reports placed in media outlets that Aisholpan was "the only" woman in the world hunting with an eagle.A 2014 article by a volunteer consultant on the film, Dennis Keen, suggested that the achievements of women in Aisholpan's region were "dismissed by nearly every prominent falconer in Central Asia" because they represented "a serious disturbance in how things are done." A March 2014 article in a Kazakhstan government-owned news source, Egemen Qazaqstan, reported eagle huntress Makpal Abrazakova as reporting that when she had wanted to participate in eagle hunting, her father had taken her to the slopes of the Alatau mountains and introduced her to the eagle hunters there, and she was well-treated by them, including the gift of an eaglet. In an article on the Russian news site Vremya in February 2013 by Nadezhda Plyaskina, Keen was also criticised for failing to discover the existence of other female Kazakh eagle festival participants, such as Akbota Bagashar or Gulaida Zhorobekova, who had preceded Aisholpan Nurgaiv's involvement in the sport.
In 2023, Al Jazeera published an article by Asha Tanna, in which she quotes an 80-year-old eagle hunter named Ajken Tabysbek's opinion on the film, that it was a publicity stunt, saying, "She did it for the cameras. Women do not hunt today". Historian Adrienne Mayor, author of a paper on the subject, is quoted: