The Eagle Huntress (2016) on Netflix
G20161h 27mAdventureDocumentarySport
Aisholpan is a thirteen-year-old Kazakh girl in Mongolia. The men in her family have hunted with golden eagles for seven generations, and she wants to become an eagle hunter.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.5/104,443 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Aisholpan Nurgaiv is thirteen and comes from a Kazakh nomad family in Mongolia. The family spends summers in a ger in the Altai Mountains and winters in a house in town. The men in her family have hunted with golden eagles for seven generations, and she wants to follow in their footsteps. With help from her father Nurgaiv, she learns to train golden eagles and captures and trains her own eaglet. Her aim is to compete at the Golden Eagle Festival at Ölgii, where no girl has entered before.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Eagle Huntress (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After historical evidence was published about nomadic steppe women training eagles to hunt from antiquity onward, the filmmakers corrected earlier reports in media outlets that called Aisholpan Nurgaiv "the first" Kazak woman in the world hunting with an eagle.
- In 2023 Al Jazeera published an article by Asha Tanna quoting Ajken Tabysbek, an 80-year-old eagle hunter, who called the film a publicity stunt and said of Aisholpan, "She did it for the cameras. Women do not hunt today".
- The filmmakers made Aisholpan Nurgaiv and her family "profit participants" in the documentary and set up a fund for her higher education, donating the $3,000 prize money from their Best Documentary win at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
- After The Eagle Huntress premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, co-executive producer Daisy Ridley agreed to add narration to it, which accounts for roughly five minutes of the 87-minute film.
