CITY OF THE STEPPES

Between the abandoned Soviet military infrastructure and the collapsed centrally planned economy on the one hand, and the pressures of a Western model on the other, the inhabitants of the city and the nomads of the steppes are trying to give new meaning to both their history and daily existence. With few words, the film captures fragments of urban and rural life in Mongolia, at a key moment in the fall of the Soviet Union, revealing the paradoxical aspects of that new vanished empire. After seventy years of communism, the city stands like a scar on the steppes and in the minds of the Mongolian people; an encyclopaedia, not only of decaying traces from the past, of old values and new meanings, but also of people, their memories, desires and conflicts. ‘City of the Steppes’ evolves around a strong feeling of absence of time: the decay of the recent past and the uncertainty of a new future. The film submerges into the fabric of the city. This creative documentary creates an impression through its associative structure and its poetry. Almost without words, the film captures fragments of urban and rural life in Mongolia. (Source: www.intifilms.com)

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project