The sands of time are unerring in their flow, which is another way of saying that if the desert is your home, time leaves few traces of you behind when you die. There is a curious ambivalence to this image, presented plaintively and plainly in Jiang Xiaoxuan’s debut feature, To Kill a Mongolian Horse. Stretching across the barren and defiant steppes of Inner Mongolia, Jiang’s elegy to the herders and horseriders of the region laments not just a lost tradition, which has been encroached on by forces impervious to its staid rhythms, but also the unchanging landscapes that constitute a tale of ceaseless violence and disarray. “Will the grasslands care if people like us live or die?” a beggar asks of Saina, a horseman played by the production manager of Jiang’s 2022 short, Graveyard of Horses. Their way of life, past and present, is a hard one.
And yet the indomitable spirit of the human will rears its head, even if in somber desperation; for To Kill a Mongolian Horse requires less of awe and wonder than it does the stoic plodding of hooves onward. Its thematic concerns are heavy and sometimes obvious, perhaps the result of a filmmaker admirably working within the confines of China’s censorship to bring to life the joys and travails of its ethnic minorities. In Saina’s case, two polar worlds threaten to deprive him of a proper life in either: his homestead bears little fruit in the face of perennial drought, while calls to join an exodus into city life — most prominently by his ex-wife Tana (Qilemuge) — inevitably sputter under a realization that the city does not belong in him. Saina’s father (Tonggalag), having accrued significant gambling debts and an alcohol dependency, sells some of their sheep, while he and an old friend, Hasa (Undus), race part-time at a circus fair, determined to perform the pride and heritage of the Mongols for the Chinese tourists that patronize them.
Jiang’s portrait of a horseman as performer evocatively fleshes out the struggle for identity, against the modernizing hand of capitalist relations no less, but foremost in the performance and preservation of a premodern masculinity. This masculinity, taking flight amid the tent flaps of the fair and shot by cinematographer Tao Kio Qiu in shades of red and haunting, cerulean blue, is an obvious simulacrum, catering to foreign eyes and staving off at best the fear of cultural extinction. But it also recalls what Christopher Beckwith termed the “nonexistence of barbarians” in Central Asia and the steppes of Inner Mongolia: these mythic warriors and savages never arrived, for they were, since the inhabitation of the land, always there. And neither have they left. The horse, a metonym for its rider, gallops across the steppes, whose barrenness “reveals buried bones” from which “an endless bondage then takes seed.” To Kill a Mongolian Horse underscores, perhaps unintentionally, the cunning of this device. In the region’s thousand-year saga of survival, time is the greatest and only killer.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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