Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France and the Hollywood studios have all produced films that play with images and fantasies about Mongolia. Most of them are centered on the glorious past of the country, with Genghis Khan as its hero, and others, such as Urga or Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia, consider other levels of Mongolian culture or society, alongside the large number of documentaries made on the country. Many of the films are difficult to see: seldom available on video, they are not the archives' favorites and are rarely screened.
Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia (1988), by German director Ulrike Ottinger, was also shot in Inner Mongolia (unlike her long documentary, Taïga, shot entirely on location in Outer Mongolia) but mostly because of the difficulty to get authorisations from the Mongolian government to shoot there. Johanna d'Arc is the story of seven Western women kidnapped by a group of female Mongolian nomads while on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The primary focus of the film is cultural interaction and conflict, not only between Mongolian natives and European and American natives but between characters with different personalities. The hero, Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig), a famous anthropologist, guides us and the other characters through the complex and unknown traditions of a Mongolian women only tribe. The film plays on all of our fantasies and images about this remote land and about the train journey that crosses all Europe to reach the lands of Asia.
Other than foreign films on or set in Mongolia, Mongolian national cinema is rather unknown, especially in Western Europe and in North America, despite a few retrospectives organised in festivals and museums (Berlinale in 1994, Festival des Trois Continents in 1994, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1995). In Asia the situation is slightly different as more festivals serve as showcases for new Mongolian films and more often organise retrospectives (such as the major one at the Fukuoka International Film Festival in 1993).