A family of Mongolian nomads in the Gobi Desert tends its herd through a difficult birthing season, and one labor runs so long that the mother camel, exhausted and in pain, rejects the white colt she finally delivers. She refuses to nurse him or let him near her, and the family tries every practical remedy they know before turning to an old ritual: a hoos ceremony, in which a musician plays the horsehead fiddle beside the mother while a singer performs a chant meant to move her to tears and open her heart to the calf. The film follows the household's daily work, milking, herding, children racing across the dunes, grandparents recalling how the old ways are fading, while building toward the ceremony itself. Shot with the family's actual herd and staged around real events rather than scripted drama, it stays close to the rhythms of desert life. The ending, camel and colt reunited through music rather than medicine, is the reason the film became an arthouse hit far beyond documentary audiences.