37 Uses For a Dead Sheep

In the village of Ulupamir in Eastern Turkey lives an old man who still knows the method of preparing the exotic dairy products of the Pamir Kyrgyz. Director Ben Hopkins has come to capture the story of the people who settled here after years of peregrination. Hopkins mixes traditional documentary elements with legends, music and reconstructions. He also shows the collaboration between the film crew and the villagers, as he wants to involve the Pamir Kyrgyz in the depiction of their culture and history as actively as possible. After some 20 years of resistance against incorporation into the Soviet Union, these shepherds of the Pamir Plateau migrated to China, and soon after they moved to a barren mountain region in Afghanistan. In 1978, following the Communist takeover of Kabul, they were among the first refugees to arrive in Pakistan. Owing to their leader's efforts, they were allowed to choose between settlement in Alaska or Turkey in 1982. The sky is the same everywhere, and there are mountains around Ulupamir as well, but homesickness eats at everybody's heart. Not the youngsters, though - they have their hearts set on Istanbul.