There are so many kinds of flutes. It was probably one of the first musical instruments invented. Mesolithic people could make one with the technology they had and carry it with them during their hunting and gathering migrations. There's also the Andean flute, the Japanese shakuhachi and a dozen other oriental flutes. Then there are clay flutes like the ocarina. It would be hard to identify one.
No, it's shakuhachi. Shaku means foot (a unit of measurement of the same order of magnitude as ours) and hachi means eight. Literally it means "one foot-eight," i.e. one and eight-tenths feet, which is the length of the instrument. Don't ask me why it didn't transform into "shakubachi." I'll never understand Japanese phonetic shifts.
I have no idea and have never heard the piece, but when I originally read this thread, it immediately brought to mind an NPR radio piece I heard about an Armenian flute called the Duduk. THe Duduk is an odd instrument, but has been used in a number of movies. Starting with The Last Temptation of Christ. And recently used in Alexander, The Passion of the Christ, The Chroncles of Narnia, and Munich. This is only a partial list. The sound is described as: "...like a cello meets a voice, meets a clarinet, meets a lot of pain, incredibly expressive and it just rocked my world." "...duduk can express something very specific, peculiar, particular, that nothing else can express. I would say evocative, I would say extreme expression from sweetness to pain and they say in Armenia, the sound of this instrument is a prayer." So. Just a guess. An interesting instrument though. 2000 years old, according to NPR. http://www.theworld.org/globalhits/2006/04/03.shtml Hey. A wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duduk
