Last night we viewed a video that proved amusingly entertaining even while it had at its heart a serious look at the changing world around us, the impact of those changes on traditional cultures that have managed to survive through dwindling ethnic numbers and the irresistible drag of both modernity and humanity's melting pot on tribal and ethnic alliances and pride of heritage.

Using the medium of a family caught halfway between the remnants of their original culture, wishing to retain its authenticity and the allure of science and technology that has gradually sieved out many elements of any traditions that defied the reality of the present, a happenstance encounter between a Mongolian herder and an expatriate Russian employed on contract to bring the world to an isolated yet waiting-to-be-developed corner of the world results in an interplay of culture, amiability and change.

The humour is wry and meaningful of the ability of humans to find levity in any situation.  With an overlay of bewilderment of the people involved at how their world has been slipping away from them, and their resulting feelings of guilt at allowing it to happen. 

Their inner consciousness leads them to cling more fiercely to what they value, while the reality of their lives slowly slipping into another kind of conscious awareness of being left behind, instructs them to embrace change.

But change does eventually absorb them all, just as surely as the Mongolian way of life on the steppes, herding sheep, goats, cattle and horses undergoes a wholesale alteration when civilization intrudes with its roads enabling development, reflecting the collapse of social-political systems at the same time, with the emerging collapse of the Soviet Union.