The best film ever made about nomadic Kazakhi shepherds

Tempting to say that "Tulpan" is the greatest Kazakhastani (sp?) movie ever made and leave it at that. However: part of what we love in movies is that they can take us to places we've never been, real and imagined (Avatar), and show us lives that we've never seen or even imagined. Much of the great world cinema of today does this, and any serious viewer of world movies has gotten to know and understand the lives the wealthy and the impoverished from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, everywhere - and Tulpan brings us with what looks to be documentary realism, and probably a cast of amateur actors, into the lives of nomadic shepherds on the Kazakh steppe. Who knew there's a story to be seen and told here, and a flat and desolate landscape, amid camels and sheep and a few goats, people living in yurts and getting about in a jeep of some sort that looks to be cobbled together from spare machinery parts. Some of the scenes are strikingly graphic: we get to see one of the character assist in the birth of a lamb, definitely not faked or digitized. This is a world few of us will ever visit or see again in any other form. If you want to see what it's like to live inside a smoky, cramped yurt where mom spends the day churning buttermilk, here's your chance. The plot - a failed attempt to forge a marriage contract - is thin as paper, but it's just enough to keep a little forward movement in this film. All that said: the film at times is so slow I thought the image was freezing onto my flatscreen, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to convey isolate, insular lives, in which the characters endlessly sing the (seemingly) same chanting song over and over and over. It's a film I appreciated more than enjoyed.