PhotoSynthesis Productions
The country of Mongolia is a fascinating one because of how it affected so much of history for so long and then became a sad story of a people oppressed. Back in 2015, I saw the movie Wolf Totem, which was a fictionalized story about China trying to industrialize and ‘modernize’ the Mongolian nomadic herdsmen. Although it was a narrative movie, it did have an interesting, if often subtle, contextualization of how modern China ‘flattens’ everyone that’s different. But even there, the movie had to be careful not to imply that China is a problem ‘now’, just ‘then’ — because they still needed China’s approval. It’s something that makes it problematic to try to tell any modern story about Mongolia.
Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan is a documentary from director Robert H. Lieberman, mainly known for directing a few other documentaries about Cambodia and Myanmar. The ‘talking heads’ here are mainly actual Mongolians now with a lot from historian and author Jack Weatherford, who wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The movie splits itself into a few pieces, trying to pull together a general theme while avoiding any sensitive political issues.
The movie goes through the history of the Mongolian people starting in an era pre-Horde or Khan, lightly touching on some of the cultural bleed-over in that part of Asia and the nomadic lifestyle that continued throughout the ages. We then hear about the big dog with a summary of how Genghis Khan rose from the son of a village chieftain to conquer much of the known world.
The film also obliquely discusses that there are a lot of likely descendants of the warlord, with a possible descendant count of 16 million people today — although this is more of a historical genetic hypothesis instead of a certainty. The movie doesn’t really get into that hypothesis either, nor does it get into the problematic nature of Khan, which is where the movie’s thesis gets a bit muddled with that idea of the ‘fallen empire’ perspective.
Finally the movie gets into the more interesting subject matter, which are the actual Mongolian citizens of today. We hear from a lot of them about the direction of their culture and thoughts about integrating with the modern world, although again, China is barely mentioned (maybe intentionally, since much of the movie was filmed there to interview people).
Listening to these people is definitely interesting, as the country of Mongolia is distinct with its own identity and ideas about how they are perceived. That was certainly the most interesting part of the movie, although I can’t say that the entire narrative completely fits together. I also can’t speak to the other documentaries by this director, so maybe the structure is similar in those other movies.
I can certainly acknowledge that there is a desire not to paint the current residents with the brush of a terrible ancestor, and I also understand that it’s hard to simply be anti-China unless you want to be blacklisted there (a problem for a documentarian). So putting all that together in context, I found the movie to be pretty entertaining and often informative, if not especially insightful or transformative. It’s a good insight into a people we often forget.
Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan has a run time of 1 hour 13 minutes, and is not rated.
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