★★★★★
The breathtaking documentary The Eagle Huntress will appeal to those in mourning after the recent end of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II. However, its delight is not just in the golden eagles that swoop from the sky above the steppes, but in the Kes-style story of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, who breaks tradition by becoming her region’s first female master eagle-handler. With a childish pink bow in her hair, Aisholpan proves to be the most unexpected heroine: small, smiley, strong as a mountain pony and filled with quiet determination.
She is the daughter and granddaughter of eagle hunters who trained the vast birds with their steely talons and 7ft wingspans to catch prey for fur and meat, and the film opens with a flash of an eagle rocketing down to take a fat fox in a short, bloody battle. Aisholpan wants to be like her father, hunting and taking part in the eagle-hunting competitions. These are like rodeos with mounted eagle handlers calling their birds from high rocks to attack a lure, or land — in a 15lb avian slam-dunk — on their trainers’ gauntlets.
In these purple-hazed, scrub and snow-covered Mongolian mountains, Aisholpan lives with her family at weekends in a yurt-like tent and spends her weekdays at school; the English class is particularly entertaining. Yet it is her extraordinarily strong and moving relationship with her father and the eagle that bring her most reward.
In one never-seen-anything-like-it scene, the British director Otto Bell catches the moment when Aisholpan and her father ride out into the wilderness to capture a baby eagle on the cusp of learning to fly for the girl to train as her own. Fearless and cheerful, Aisholpan slides and half abseils down a scree-covered cliff to land in a giant nest with two young, surprised eagles. She balances above a precipice, lassos one toddler-sized bird, wraps it in a rug and calls to her dad to haul it up. Meanwhile, the mother eagle hovers ominously above.
The nomads of Bayan-Ölgii doubt Aisholpan’s abilities and a bunch of old hunters suck their remaining teeth over tea and shake their heads sadly, saying women aren’t strong enough to hunt and should stay at home. Aisholpan confounds everyone’s expectations and the pride in her father’s eyes is wonderful to behold.
U, 87min