From the Chinese director of Girl from Hunan and Women from the Lake of Scented Souls comes this lyric romance set amid a culture in transition. Chinese boy Bayinbulag and Mongolian girl Somiya are raised by their foster grandmother in the steppes of Outer Mongolia, living happily as yurt-dwelling nomadic shepherds, milking goats, herding wild horses. When the children become teenagers, their grandmother urges them to marry, and Bayinbulag goes to veterinary school for three years. But upon his return to the grasslands from the city, he finds his betrothed pregnant, having been seduced by the local playboy. Torn between shame and love, he flees, leaving behind a distraught Somiya, his doting grandmother, and his rustic life. Years later, a well-loved singer, he returns to find Somiya unhappily married to a drunkard, and the mother of five children.

A Mongolian Tale won awards for Best Director and Best Artistic Contribution for Music at the 1995 Montreal Film Festival; and Tengger, the quietly charismatic Mongolian composer who wrote the haunting score, and who plays Bayinbulag as an adult, has a huge following in China and Taiwan. But the heartstopping landscape is finally the star here: masterfully photographed, it becomes eerily animistic, utterly sensual, completely unforgettable. At the Coolidge Corner.