Kasimir Burgess made a documentary Franklin a few years back, that I really enjoyed. With that film, he used a central story and narration to help us understand several threads about activism, nature, and acceptance of identity.

With this Mongolian documentary, he is working with much more chaotic and uncontrollable content. Coming in late to the project, Burgess was fascinated by the story of a centuries old tradition of Mongolian horse herders taking herds up across mountain pastures in winter to forage. This practice ended a few years back, something that’s not particularly explained, but we can perhaps read between the lines that it is due to increasing industrialisation of Mongolia and a shift away from rural communities and farming practices.

We follow a family who have decided to resurrect the tradition. They talk a group of horse farmers into letting them take their herds up over the mountains. Along for the ride are two young men, experiencing winter herding for the first time.

On the surface this seems to be about Mongolian culture, but it is as much about masculinity and the initiation into manhood that has been sustained and perpetuated in indigenous cultures across generations. For Batbold and Tsagana, this is about experiencing the extreme cold and isolation of the mountain passes, dealing with night patrols of the herd in -50° weather, dealing with wolves and an ‘iron winter’ of severe conditions.

It is also about having to cook from meagre rations over a stove, constructing their ger in a way that is correct and respectful, knowing how to slaughter animals, and make peace with gods. It is about wrestling, and horse riding, and wrangling wild horses.

You can imagine the beauty of the landscapes that we see. Burgess and cinematographer Benjamin Bryan use drone footage well (it’s becoming ubiquitous in films) and we see the beauty of ant-like horses tracking across snowy terrain. The sunrise over the snow capped mountains is exquisite and you can feel every steaming breath in the cold.

From the Q&A, afterwards, I can get an understanding of how hard it was to work in that environment, and also the need to slow down to Mongolian time and ways of doing things. I think the result is that the documentary doesn’t have as strong a narrative pull as Franklin, and I struggled to differentiate between the characters or really understand what was happening. Some of the scenes of dialogue seemed staged, where characters ask each other questions we know are for our benefit.

It was only in the Q&A afterwards, that I learnt that the ‘iron winter’ of the title is thought to be caused by climate change, and that it is slowly destroying a way of life in Mongolia. We see some scenes of Batbold in Ulaanbaatar, trying to find a life that is not about horses and I can see how this is to add some complexity to the narrative but it felt a little laboured.

Props to the filmmaking team for putting together something so visually arresting in what must have been very difficult conditions and I’m sad that it felt a bit less than the sum of its parts.