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Images of a Mongolian girl's quest to become an eagle hunter instantly assured Otto Bell that he had found the subject for a documentary.
Bell, then an art director for an ad agency, contacted Asher Svidensky, the photographer whose images of Aisholpan Nurgaiv and two Kazakh eagle hunters were the subject of a 2014 BBC Web magazine story before going viral.
"The pictures were so wonderful, [Aisholpan] was so immediately endearing and the landscape was so jaw-droppingly gorgeous," Bell says. "I thought about adding sight, sound and emotion to these stills, and thought there must be a film in there."
The photographer agreed to introduce Bell to the Nurgaiv family, and the pair flew to the remote Altai mountain range in western Mongolia to launch the project. Bell expected it would take some time to persuade the family to agree to the possibility of a documentary film.
Instead, the father invited him to come along that afternoon as Aisholpan took on the first challenge in a yearslong journey to becoming an eagle hunter. Would they like to film her as she attempted to steal a baby eagle from its cliff-side nest?
"Not a lot of documentary filmmakers get this chance," said Bell prior to the debut screenings of his first documentary, "The Eagle Huntress," at the Sundance Film Festival. "It's a rare opportunity to be there right at the beginning of a story arc."
Bell unpacked his equipment and scrambled to plan a shoot. That adventure became the first act of the documentary, which was eventually structured around three action sequences.
The second act is filmed at an eagle festival where Aisholpan is the only female competitor among 70 to 80 males, mostly men, while the last act is an epic winter eagle hunt where temperatures routinely plunged to 40 and 50 degrees below zero.
Mongolian women traditionally were considered not strong enough to handle eagle hunting in such extreme temperatures and rugged terrain. Aisholpan, now 15, is thought to be the only female training for the 2,000-year-old tradition.
Her father, a master hunter descended from seven generations of eagle hunters, had originally trained his oldest son. But when the son was conscripted into the army, his daughter agreed to help with the chores of herding the family's sheep and cattle, if she could also help with the eagles. Her father had said he wouldn't train her unless she asked, Svidensky wrote in a blog post about his original photographs.
The girl had been transfixed by the majestic birds since she was a baby, Bell says. She is training as an eagle hunter "because she doesn't believe there's any difference between boys and girls," the director says. "It's less about an agenda and more a sort of guilelessness that she doesn't think it should be any other way."
"The Eagle Huntress" is also breaking ground as the first documentary selected for the three-year-old Sundance Kids program. "Documentaries aren't just for grownups," says the British filmmaker, 34, who financed most of the film with his savings. "It bears out what we had hoped, that you will find universal themes in this film that work for kids but are broad enough to appeal across the age spectrum."
The film's beautiful cinematography complements the power of its story, says Patrick Hubley, artistic director of the Utah Film Center who programs the Sundance Kids program. "I hope that people will look at this and decide they should make more documentaries for younger audiences. That's an underserved audience."
His boss, Geralyn Dreyfous, agrees. She's the founder of the film center, which is a fiscal sponsor of the film, and an executive producer. Other names attached to the project include executive producer Morgan Spurlock, noted for his documentary "Super Size Me," while singer-songwriter Sia contributed "Angel By The Wings" for the film's soundtrack, which promoters label a "girl-power" anthem. And on Friday, Daisy Ridley, who played the plucky scavenger Rey in the mega-popular "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," announced she has signed on as executive producer for the movie.
"It's really like a fable," says Dreyfous of "The Eagle Huntress." "The story is so simple. There's very little language, and the cinematography is majestic. It's a beautiful and timeless film, and I think it's going to be a real crowd-pleaser."
In fact, she thinks the film has great commercial potential to be bought and distributed by a major studio. "The Eagle Huntress" could be a breakthrough for kids' documentaries in the way that the 1990 Sundance screenings of "Sex, Lies and Videotape" launched filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, in specific, and the indie filmmaking ethos of Sundance, in general, into the cinematic stratosphere.
As a Utah-based producer, she has worked to coordinate the building of a Mongolian yurt, called a "ger," at the Kimball Art Center, and an exhibit of Svidensky's photographs at the Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery on Park City's Main Street.
The yurt will be the centerpiece of eagle demonstrations by Aisholpan and her family this weekend. Also coming to the festival from Oklahoma are Comanche elders, who are eagle handlers, and whose tribe is believed to be descended from Mongolians.
There are only several hundred eagle hungers in the world, and the majority live in the remote region of northwestern Mongolia that Bell describes as feeling like the end of the world. It takes three or four days to travel there from New York, which Bell describes as a "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" kind of trip, particularly while hauling about 70 kilos of gear.
"It's one of the remotest parts of the remotest country in the world," he says. His small crew of filmmakers relied on ingenuity to capture the area's "other-worldly landscape," employing a drone and a 30-foot crane, as well as an "eagle camera," attached to the bird through a jury-rigged dog harness.
That is, it was as if they had attached a Go-Pro to an eagle, laughs Bell, crediting cinematographer Simon Niblett for overcoming technical challenges. "Some shots where the eagle is just going and going and going, and it's in focus the entire time, I don't know how he did it."
Contrasting with that soaring nature photography are more intimate scenes of a nomadic family's everyday life at home in a yurt. He was fascinated by the character of Aisholpan, who appears to be a shy teenager, fascinated by cell phones and pop culture, yet she also happens to have nerves of steel. "I remember seeing little pictures of pop stars carefully cut out of magazines that she looks to for fashion advice," Bell says. "This is a girl who is spending a lot of her time dressed in furs and indigenous costumes."
He hopes the story taps into the zeitgeist of popular culture seeking girl role models with the strength of Katniss Everdeen from "The Hunger Games." As Bell says of Aisholpan, "she's an epic character," but she just happens to be real.
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Sundance Kids: "The Eagle Huntress"
Sunday, 11:30 a.m. • Prospector Square Theater, Park City
Sunday, 6 p.m. • Salt Lake City Library Theater
Jan. 30, 3:30 p.m. • Redstone Cinema 1, Park City
Also • On Saturday, live eagle demonstrations will take place at Mongolian Ger at the Kimball Art Center, 1401 Kearns Blvd., Park City
More • Asher Svidensky's photography, which inspired the film, will be on exhibit at the Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery, nicknamed The Eagle Huntress Gallery, 444 Main St., Park City
Hours • 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. during the Sundance Film Festival
The 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Where • Park City and venues in Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance Resort
When • Through Jan. 31
Tickets • $20 per screening. Box offices are in the Gateway Center, 136 Heber Ave., Park City, and in Trolley Square, 600 East and 600 South, Salt Lake City.
Waitlist information • Register at ewaitlist.sundance.org and download the app to your smartphone or tablet; waitlist tickets are $20, cash only.
Program guide • sundance.org/festivals/sundance-film-festival
All the news • Keep up with The Salt Lake Tribune's full Sundance coverage at sltrib.com/entertainment/sundance