Filmed on the rugged, untamed flats of the Gobi Desert with a cast of Mongolian non-actors, "The Story of the Weeping Camel" is only slightly more organic than, say, "Van Helsing." At times it feels like the celluloid itself must have sprung up out of the dusty ground, so discrete and synchronous are the film's rhythms.

Inspired by the watchful, quasi- documentary techniques of filmmaker Robert Flaherty (“Nanook of the North"), this simple, unpolished drama takes place amid a small family of herders that faces a crisis when a mother camel refuses to nurse her newborn calf following a difficult delivery. Every second of the birth is unblinkingly captured by directors Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa, suggesting that nature played a principal role in the movie's line production, dictating where and when the shots would take place.

Much as some American Indian cultures orbited around the buffalo, the Mongols depend on the camel, from wool to make ropes to the camel teeth that their children use as rudimentary dice. There are scenes of camel shearing, camel midwifing, ad infinitum. "May your humps grow strong," a tribal elder blesses a calf, surely one of the strangest benedictions proffered in any culture. The camel turns out to be a handsomely cinematic creature.

The movie takes its own sweet time. There are no pulse-quickening narrative techniques and no musical scores, save for the scene in which the family recruits a musician — bearing a stringed instrument known as a balalaika — to play for the mother camel. Legend has it the soulful balalaika song is a powerful tonic for reluctant mothers who refuse to nurse their young. Filmed and acted with heartfelt tenderness, it's an extremely strange, moving scene. Cosmetically, "The Story of Weeping the Camel" (billed as the first- ever Oscar submission from Mongolia) bears a certain similarity to "The Fast Runner" (2002), which depicted an Inuit tribe in its natural, unmolested state. Unlike "The Fast Runner," this movie lacks dramatic rigging — it meanders for the most part, lacks intrigue and suffers from low blood pressure.

What it does offer is comfortingly basic: the wonder of nature and the bright, universal reassurance of family.