A surprisingly moving and pure documentary - or is it?

This movie had been in our Q for a long time and I'd pushed off watching it largely because of its ridiculous title - The Story of the Weeping Camel - but did watch it last night and to my surprise we were very much caught up in this sweet and exotic tale which turns out to be a documentary, at least of sorts. We're with a small outpost - seems to be just 2 extended families - of Mongolian animal herders, with the flock of sheep, maybe goals, and of course camels. The simple narrative line concerns the eponymous camel who, during birthing season, has a traumatic, two-day labor to give birth to a white colt; as a result of the traumatic labor (which we see in vivid detail) the mother camel cannot bond with her child - so the families that raise the camel do all that the can to try to get the mother to allow the colt to nurse. The human nature and the emotions on the very expressive faces of these camels are astounding, and it's impossible not to feel for or toward them: anger at the mother so mean to the colt, sorrow for this infant animal trying so hard to approach the mother and possibly starving to death - and of course we feel for these people struggling to make a living in a culture that has hardly changed for a thousand years - although we see a bit of the changes being wrought as two of the children set off for a nearby village to get some help in their quest. I won't give anything away except to say that the end is extremely moving and touching in ways I would not have anticipated. On one level, this is a pure documentary in the emerging documentary style: no interviews, all filmed live, we never see or hear a word from the film crew. On another level, I'm not so sure: the credits note that this is "written and directed by" a team of 2, based on a "story idea" by another - and I do think, while much of the film is pure documentary footage, other parts are set up by the filmmakers - including the trip to the village and, throughout, the beautiful costuming: it always looks as if the herders and children are dressed for a religious celebration - colorful embroidered silks, even on the children - rather than for a working day of a trans-Gobi camel ride.