Teenage eagle hunter is Mongolia’s new movie star (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

13:08, 5 August 2016

ASTANA. KAZINFORM A 13-year-old girl stands proud in the mountains of western Mongolia, cradling the eagle she has trained to hunt. She's carrying on a legacy that has defined this region for centuries.

But the girl, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, is also challenging a tradition. Though she is not the first female eagle hunter—there’s evidence of female eagle hunters from as early as tenth-century Persia according to a report by Stanford University researcher Adrienne Mayor, and National Geographic photographed Princess Nirgidma of Mongolia with her hunting eagle in 1932—Nurgaiv is the first Mongolian woman to compete in the country’s Golden Eagle Festival.

These images of Nurgaiv, by photographer Asher Svidensky, went viral in 2014. Now Nurgaiv is the star of a new documentary, The Eagle Huntress, which charts her efforts to train her eagle and compete against men on a national level. The film, which is executive-produced and narrated by Star Wars star Daisy Ridley, premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is scheduled for U.S. release October 28 by Sony Pictures Classics.

Director Otto Bell chatted with National Geographic via email about following Nurgaiv and her father, Agalai, through the changing Mongolian seasons for nearly a year, his subject’s unshakeable confidence, and the challenges of strapping a GoPro to an eagle.

The film was inspired by the viral photographs. Tell me more about that.

I happened to see Asher Svidensky’s photos of Aisholpan the day they hit the Internet back in April 2014. I remember being struck by the sight of this young girl perched on a mountain casting an enormous eagle into the air. Her face, the landscape, the magnificent bird. It was like a painting.

I contacted Asher through Facebook and, as we began talking, his photos started to gain real momentum online. I saw that as a kind of proof: If we could add sound and motion, surely we would have the beginnings of a great documentary on our hands? So he and I jumped on a plane and set out to find Aisholpan and her family.

The eagle-hunting tradition in Mongolia seems to be part sport, part utility. Tell me a bit more about the role it plays in their culture.

I’d go further than that and say that this tradition is intrinsically tied to their sense of identity. It’s more than a mere pastime to these people. For the nomadic Kazakh minority of northwestern Mongolia, eagle hunting can be a big part of how they define themselves and their ancestry. There is a healthy dose of machismo mixed in there, too. We saw a correlation between how successful men are at hunting and how highly they are esteemed by their community.

By Andrew Lapin, a film critic and journalist who has written for NPR, Vulture, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications.