The Eagle Huntress

Some reviewers and researchers felt that the documentary overstated the amount of opposition Aisholpan faced as a female eagle hunter and that the early promotion of the film included an ethnocentric and distortive description of the Kazakh eagle hunting culture as being one of "ingrained misogyny" (IMDb description for initial 7 months from film's premiere).[15][16] After historical evidence and facts were published about nomadic steppe women participating in training eagles to hunt from antiquity to the present day,[17] the filmmakers corrected early reports placed in media outlets that Aisholpan was "the only" woman in the world hunting with an eagle.[18][19][20] Said reports in the media no doubt stemmed from Director Otto Bell's assertion during the initial, main interview conducted during the film's premiere at Sundance Film Festival in January 2016 whereby he claimed Aisholpan was: "Changing history (as the) first woman in 2000 years of male-dominated history to ever take up this tradition." [28] A 2014 article by a consultant on the film, Dennis Keen, suggests that women in Aisholpan's region faced a "knee-jerk reaction based on a traditionalist understanding of society and the sexes," such that their achievements "are dismissed by nearly every prominent falconer in Central Asia" because they represented "a serious disturbance in how things are done."[21] Aisholpan has described the opposition she faced in her own words.[22][23]

Despite Dennis Keen's above-noted assertion, in a 8 March 2014 article entitled "Он үшінде қондырған қолға қыран" (https://egemen.kz/article/29988-on-ushinde-qondyrghan-qolgha-qyran) by Suleimen Mamet for Egemen Qazaqstan news, eagle huntress, Makpal Abrazakova, said: "Realizing my enthusiasm, my father deliberately took me to the eagle hunters on the slopes of Alatau [Qazaqstan] and introduced me to the eagle hunters. I was blessed by such elders as Tleubek Esimbek, Aben Toktasynov, Seitzhan Kodekov. Seeing commitment and talent in me they bestowed me with an eaglet/baby eagle which they thought/predicted could become a best hunting eagle in the future." And in a 4 March 2014 article entitled "Falconry Tournament Tests Ancient Skills" (https://astanatimes.com/2014/03/falconry-tournament-tests-ancient-skills/) by Asset Kalymov for The Astana Times news, two of the men mentioned in the above-noted article as having blessed Makpal's eagle hunting career were described as: "famous berkutchis Aben Toktasynuly and Seitzhan Kodekov whose efforts in the early 1990s helped revive this Kazakh tradition." Thus, the men Dennis Keen cites as objecting are only a subset of prominent eagle hunters, and the very men who blessed Makpal's engagement were elders integrally important to the resurrection of the eagle hunting tradition in Kazakhstan during post-Soviet rule.

In addition, although Dennis Keen served as a voluntary film consultant to Otto Bell, he failed to discover the existence of other Kazakh eagle festival participants such as Akbota Bagashar, or Gulaida Zhorobekova, an eagle (and other birds of prey) falconer of Kyrgyzstan, both of whom also preceded Aisholpan Nurgaiv in terms of female engagement in eagle falconry in Central Asia. In an article dated 26 February 2013 by Nadezhda Plyaskina called "The Basic Instinct" with a photo by Roman Egorov,[24] Akbota Bagashar is noted as having competed at the "Sonar-2013" festival, near Nura, a 3 day competition with 40 competitors, involving shirga (lures) and live prey. In that article she said she began going out on hunts with her grandfather as a child and went on her first hunt with her own eagle at age 15. At the 2013 festival in Nura she was awarded a prize by virtue of being the only female competing.

Aisholpan stated her desire to study medicine and become a doctor.[25] The filmmakers made Aisholpan and her family "profit participants" in the documentary and established a fund to help pay for Aisholpan's higher education.[26] They also donated the $3,000 prize money they received from winning Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival to this fund.[27]