I missed Byambasuren Davaa’s last film, The Story of the Weeping Camel – the trailer looked promising, and I guess I just couldn’t drag myself out of the house for a movie about a depressed dromedary. Truth be told, I probably went to see the latest dumb blockbuster instead. I nearly made the same mistake with this, her second feature; and I’m glad I didn’t, because The Cave of the Yellow Dog is a truly fantastic film.

Yellow Dog is semi-documentary in both style and content; from the credits the cast appear to be a real family, and the story (such as it is) is a loose thread at best. Nansal, her younger brother and sister and their parents, live as nomadic herders on the Mongolian veldt. One day, when her father is away in the city, she finds a dog in a mountainside cave and adopts it. When her father gets back he orders her to send the dog away, suspecting that it may have lived with wolves and fearing an attack. Nansal slyly resists, but matters come to a head when the family moves on to find new pasture grounds.

That’s all there is to it, and while it’s amusingly and entertainingly told, it wouldn’t support anything short of a Disney movie on its own. But Davaa is as much if not more interested in showing us a way of life that’s totally and bewilderingly removed from our own, and in preserving something that may soon be extinct. Certainly, the most powerful theme here is of encroaching civilization, as the family drifts by inches towards modernity and a potential move into the city.

That sounds dull, but it isn’t. Instead, The Cave of the Yellow Dog is frequently beautiful, from the acting to the music to the startling cinematography – every image is imaginatively framed and some are downright gob-smacking. Buoyed by charming performances and a subtle, witty script, images of day to day life become genuinely interesting. Some, like the scene in which the family move house (that is, literally, move house – walls, roof, furniture all collapsed and loaded into a convoy of wagons in the space of a few hours) are completely absorbing.

Neither is it patronizing or preachy, as it easily could have been. There are digs at so-called progress, as when the father brings back a truly terrifying toy dog to replace Nansal’s adopted pet; and also a repeated suggestion that these people have basically been abandoned by their government.

But for the most part Yellow Dog is a film of moments, of small lovingly-noted insights, and Davaa’s fascination with and passion for her subject are such that it’s hard not to be infected.