Starring Odgerel Ayusch and Ikhbayar Amgaabazar. In Mongolian and Russian with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

And you think you have problems. Well, when's the last time your lead camel had an albino foal and then refused to care for it? These things really matter when you are a family of nomadic Mongolians skirting the edges of the dry, windblown Gobi Desert and everything depends on your herd.

This semidocumentary film, which captures real events in the course of a loosely planned journey, is a beautifully shot paean to a kind of simplicity that is more complicated than it looks. The Story of the Weeping Camel (the title actually refers to the mother, not the baby) was directed by Byambasuren Davaa--who herself grew up in Mongolia--and the Italian-born Luigi Falorni.

Not everything here is translated by the terse subtitles, nor does it need to be. The subjects are not people who articulate much more than basic information about the tasks or pleasures at hand. But this is not to say that those efforts are without resonance.

Handsome couple Odgoo and Ikchee (the names are simplified versions of the participants' full monikers) look after their aging parents, a baby girl, and two mischievous boys who are much attracted to the comfort they find in other travellers' tents from time to time.

The effort to find harmony among the camels--in this case, literally, thanks to one of the most emotionally compelling musical sequences ever caught on celluloid--is also a metaphor for the care that humans need to apply to the planet in general, especially as discord increases.

The film doesn't belabour this point, however, and neither need its audience. In the end, The Story of the Weeping Camel will be equally entertaining (there isn't a dull moment in it) for lovers of music, the human voice, ethnography, wild locations, rich colours--and those strange creatures that look like they escaped from prehistoric times and yet have eyes that seem capable of peering into the future.