On DVD: "37 Uses for a Dead Sheep"

Welcome comeback of the week: Ben Hopkins, schoolboy visionary of the British cinema, presumed missing after the commercial underperformance of his fabular meanderings Simon Magus and The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz. [He was to return in cinemas earlier this year with the downbeat globalisation parable The Market.] Hopkins' films move in strange directions to unfamiliar locations; that's the case again with 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, a documentary made - the narration insists, in a semantic smudge - "with" rather than "about" the people of the Pamir Kirghiz, a nomadic tribe who've shifted from "the roof of the world" to their present position in East Turkey.

Things change: most Kirghiz youngsters would these days rather live in Istanbul and open Internet cafes; as one young man puts it, surveying the plains upon which his forefathers have survived for so long, "In thirty years' time, there will be no-one here". (The film's penultimate image is a melancholy one: faces blending into a crowd; homogenisation.) Hopkins' aim is to get the elder Kirghiz to recount their myths and legends for themselves, to collaborate in committing their vanishing culture to celluloid. Thus we get heated games of something called Dead Goat Polo (above), historical recreations in the style of silent cinema, and a truly bizarre sidebar for which Sandra Bullock's rare show of bad sportsmanship (in refusing to clear her image rights) deserves the loudest possible booing.

We also get scenes in which Hopkins has to explain and justify his own methodology to locals raising objections to his presence. They give as good as they get: the understanding is that the Kirghiz, having weathered poverty, oppression, exile and decades living off the land, have no real problem fending off this well-spoken, earring-sporting Brit. Entirely fresh in its approach to history and what might, at first, appear an alien culture, it's another singular entry in Hopkins' cherishably eccentric filmography: rather like watching one of those The Story of the Weeping Camel-like ethnographic studies at the same time as a DVD making-of, and a larky culture-clash comedy in which yoghurt and expired livestock play unexpectedly prominent parts.

(November 2006)

37 Uses for a Dead Sheep is available on DVD from Monday.