Renowned Mongolian folk singer Urna Chahar-Tugchi travels from Inner Mongolia to on a musical mission. She takes her grandmother’s horse-headed fiddle, mangled and hidden during the Cultural revolution. On it are words of a forgotten folk song, ‘The Two Horses of Genghis Khan’. She travels across Outer Mongolia to try to find someone who can reconstruct this melody.
As keening and poignant as the music that it makes its centre, The Two Horses of Genghis Khan finds Byambasuren Davaa on a parallel quest to its heroine. They are both on a journey to capture folk culture untainted by colonisation, to find wholeness through a disrupted past. As alive to the impossibility of this journey, as it is sumptuously committed to the beauty of its intention, The Two Horses of Genghis Khan is Davaa’s most underrated work.
The film is part of Inner and Outer: The Mongolian Films of Byambasuren Davaa, a short season curated by Duncan Carson, screening at the Garden Cinema and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
