According to conservative pundits, Hollywood has turned its collective back on family audiences. Apart from churning out potentially lucrative animated features, such as Shrek the Third, Ratatouille and Surf’s Up, the studios have displayed little interest in movies that appeal in equal measure to parents, tots, tweens, teens and young adults. In fact, there’s no scarcity of terrifically entertaining family pictures in the marketplace. Harder to find are parents willing to broaden their own horizons. Could March of the Penguins have prospered in its native French narration? Ditto Microcosmos and Winged Migration. 

Doubtful ... but shouldn’t kids here be exposed to faraway cultures, customs and languages, just as their international peers are inundated with American products? In the past few years, several outstanding docudramas failed to find substantial audiences, if only because they were released in the native languages of the characters and amateur actors. They included The Story of the Weeping Camel, Cave of the Yellow Dog, Himalaya, The Saltmen of Tibet, The Cup and Travelers & Magicians.

Pascal Plisson’s splendid coming-of-age docudrama, Masai: The Rain Warriors, chronicles the quest of a band of young and inexperienced Masai hunters who are ordered to track down and kill a lion of near-mythic powers. Village elders believe that a crippling drought will end only after the untested warriors bring back the lion’s mane. The beast leads them across the parched grasslands of the Rift Valley, in Kenya’s African Highlands, as well as the backyards of rival tribesmen.

In addition to being a great and timeless adventure, the mission demands of the boys that they bond as friends, comrades in arms and community stalwarts. The cinematography on display in The Rain Warriors s nothing short of spectacular—even on the small screen—a virtue Plisson’s film shares with all of the aforementioned titles. Watch enough of them in one sitting and you’ll wonder if you’re living in the same century, and on the same planet, as the men and women being portrayed on film.