It sounds a little like a Disney movie, perhaps, but The Eagle Huntress is a documentary of uncommon beauty, shot in western Mongolia in three grabs between July 2014 and February 2015.

But while it has wowed them at festivals around the world since its debut at Sundance in January 2016, not everyone has been convinced.

"People say 'oh, this is staged, it's too good to be true'," observes director Otto Bell of the backlash against the film in some quarters. "I get it; I understand why the cynical critics pooh-pooh it. I take it as a bit of a compliment, actually."

But to those who don't believe it's real, he has a simple rejoinder. "Get lost! We didn't stage anything."

The film follows the fortunes of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl called Aisholpan, who wants to learn the ancient art of eagle hunting - hunting foxes on horseback, with an eagle - from her father. He is a two-time champion in the annual Golden Eagle festival; his father was a champion, too.

In all, the men of the Nurgaiv clan have been hunting with eagles for 12 generations. No girl or woman, though, has ever been permitted to spread her wings in this way, so when Aisholpan says it's what she wants to do, it ruffles a few feathers, though her father and mother support her wholeheartedly. Bell has a series of elder-statesmen in the rarefied world of eagle hunting address the camera with their views: it's not for girls; women should make tea, not hunt; women are not strong enough. That sort of thing.

They sound typically patriarchal and hidebound, but gee they look good, sitting cross-legged in their gers (portable tents similar to yurts) resplendent in their handcrafted finery.

"Those guys are used to being photographed, let's put it that way," says Bell. "There's quite a bit of peacocking involved - they grab their furs, they sit in state."

And so, the central conflict of The Eagle Huntress is established: a young girl wants to follow her passion. Tradition stands in her way. Who will win?

The marketing for the film has suggested, without ever quite stating, that Aisholpan is the first ever female eagle hunter. She's not; as Stanford academic Adrienne Mayor convincingly argues, there have been many female eagle hunters, dating back to ancient times, and a handful of them in the modern era. But Aisholpan is a rarity, and an especially telegenic one at that.

With her broad face, perfect teeth and sparkling eyes, Aisholpan could have come straight from central casting. Her quiet confidence, application to her studies - she's a straight-A student at the school at which she boards during the week - and, above all, her bond with her family make her a dream.

Aisholpan (left) at school, in The Eagle Huntress. Photo: Asher Svidensky

"The first time I saw Aisholpan, having flown across the world to see her, was incredible," Bell has said. "They are very reserved people, so I had to keep my feelings in check, but inside I was punching the air."

But in truth that wasn't the first time Bell had seen her. In April 2014, the New York-based Englishman saw an online image of her setting an eagle free. The shot had been taken by Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky, and Bell immediately made contact. "I stalked him on Facebook," he says, "and then I Skyped him."

Others were already on the trail, so Bell had to move quickly. He had been shooting long-form documentary-style commercials for years, and had been dreaming of making a film of his own. "I wanted to not have a client or brand objectives, that sort of stuff," he says.

He was sure that girl and that bird would be his subject. So in July he traded a flight home from a job in Egypt for a ticket to Mongolia, persuading the cameraman on the job to come along . "I can't pay you," he warned, "but we're going to go track down this girl, see what the story is."

Simply finding them was a challenge - "they're nomadic, so it was like, 'oh yeah, I think they're over that mountain'," Bell says - but the effort was worthwhile. On day one, Nurgaev announced he and Aisholpan were going to try to steal a young eagle from its nest, so that she might train it up for hunting. "Is that the kind of thing you'd like to film?" he casually asked.

Bell could hardly believe his luck, though he hadn't brought high-end camera gear because he hadn't imagined he'd be leaping straight into production.

The photo that started it all. Photo: Asher Svidensky

"I was hoping to get the exclusive rights to tell the story, and maybe film a bit of her life - 'this is her, she walks, she talks; it's real' - and bring that back to financiers," he says. "But we ended up filming that amazing sequence, and that became the heart of the first act."

And it is amazing - so much so that is one of the reasons people have concluded much of the film has been staged.

But, Bell insists, he just got lucky. "We did it in one take, on the first afternoon. When you've got a mother eagle circling above, threatening to descend on you, you tend to do things pretty quickly."

In October, he went back - with a full crew and proper gear - to shoot more sequences, including the Golden Eagle competition, a kind of gymkhana in which 70 eagle hunters are judged on a range of criteria, from riding to dress to their hunting abilities.

Bell spent $US80,000 - "my whole life's savings" - and took out a high-interest loan to fund the trip. "I thought we need to throw the kitchen sink at this thing, to do justice to this big landscape and these remarkable characters," he says. "My feeling was just because it's a true story that doesn't mean it can't also be beautiful."

Aisholpan's performance at the competition provides the film with a climax of sorts, but to Bell it felt too much like a sports movie. And when he went back to the old men to ask what they thought, they coughed up a laundry list of reasons why she still couldn't be considered a real eagle hunter: "They said, 'her dad's a great coach, the bird is phenomenal, it's because tourists were there and it's nice for them. But you know she'll never be able to hack it in winter.' And I was like, 'Oh, God, we're going to have to come back'."

Aisholpan hunting for foxes in the Altai mountains. Photo: Sony Pictures Entertainment

He was broke, but a friend had years earlier given him an email address for Morgan Spurlock, the gonzo documentary maker who came to fame with Super Size Me. Bell edited the eagle-stealing sequence and sent it to Spurlock, who responded the same day. "I haven't seen anything like this, how can I help you get this thing finished," he wrote.

Spurlock set him up with producers, editors, space to work on it. "Up to that point," Bell says, "I'd been kind of alone and going a bit mad. It was fine when I was directing it, because everything was going our way. But then when you get back home and you don't have any money left and it all gets a bit depressing - he helped build a village of people around me."

In February 2015, Bell and his team went back to film the final act, in which Aisholpan and her father trek on horseback into the Altai mountains in deepest winter to capture a fox. It was 22 days of trial and error, in sub-zero temperatures that caused the filmmakers' hands to stick to their equipment. It was worth it.

But is it all just a bit too neat?

It's clear that Bell approached his subject with the canny eye of a man trained in the art of crafting images to sell a message. And it's true that when he first saw that image of Aisholpan, he knew there was something zeitgeisty in it. "I was looking around at pop culture at that time and you had Khaleesi, the mother of dragons [from Game of Thrones], you had Katniss Everdeen [from The Hunger Games], you had Rey [from Star Wars: The Force Awakens]. And I thought, 'My God, this girl is the real thing'."

Aisholpan and her eagle. Photo: Asher Svidensky

It's true, too, that he felt he had the makings of a cool little fable about female empowerment on his hands - if only he could make it.

But as the project progressed, he says, "it just became very clear that it was a story about a dad and his daughter. Aisholpan wasn't looking for some sort of public validation. I know that at heart what she really wanted to do was go out hunting with her dad."

The only artistic licence he took, he insists, is the opening sequence in which a hunter sets his bird free (the Kazakhs release their eagles after seven years, deeming them to have entered the stage of their lives when they are ready to become parents themselves). That one, he says, came out of order, but nothing else did.

"I didn't have to cook the books," says Bell. "It was all laid out for me. I just had to get there and make sure we captured it."

The Eagle Huntress is on limited release nationally from March 16. On Sunday March 12, Melbourne's Cinema Nova and Cameo Belgrave will host preview screenings with wedge-tailed eagle demonstrations. The Lido in Hawthorn is hosting a preview on March 13, with an exhibition of photos taken at the Golden Eagle festival by former Big Day Out photographer Sophie Howarth in the foyer.

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin