Byambasuren Davaa
Byambasuren Davaa (born 1971) is a Mongolian filmmaker based in Germany whose ethnographically textured docu-fiction films have brought Mongolia's nomadic life to international audiences. Born in Ulaanbaatar, she studied at the Mongolian Film Academy and worked as a director's assistant at Mongolian National Television before moving to Munich in 2000 to study documentary film and communication sciences at the University of Television and Film Munich. Her debut feature The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003), co-directed with Luigi Falorni, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won Best Documentary at the Directors Guild of America Awards. She followed with The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2006), about a real nomadic family in the Altai whose lives are upended by a stray dog, and Two Horses of Genghis Khan. Her work blends real lives, real settings, and lightly fictionalized framing.