by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Batbold, Tsagana, Bayankhangai, Jiray
Intro:
… a devastating, humbling beauty …
Over the winter season of 2023-2024, Mongolia was hit with one of the most destructive weather disasters in nearly five decades.
After a short period of warming led to a sudden return to sub-zero temperatures, creating ice cover that only further hindered the ability of the livestock central to Mongolia’s herding culture to feed, the resulting ‘tumur’ (iron) ‘dzud’ (natural disaster) caused a disastrous loss of animal life, going from two million dead by late February to just over seven million by early June. That’s more than one-tenth of the entire country’s livestock.
Iron Winter, directed by Aussie documentarian Kasimir Burgess (Franklin, The Leunig Fragments), captures this moment of despair through the eyes of those directly affected by it, with young-adult horse-herders Batbold and Tsagana, along with Batbold’s father Bayankhangai and his right-hand man Jijray, herding 2000 animals across the Tsaikhir Valley to safer grazing land while learning more about the traditions of their people. Like The Wolves Always Come at Night, the film serves an act of Australian/Mongolian cultural exchange, framing the continuation of this practice amidst an ever-harsher environment as a microcosm for the effects of climate change, as well as depicting the dichotomy of that rural living with the demands of modern technological life.
However, where Wolves had moments of docudrama to help ease the harshness of that reality (albeit in small amounts), there is no such respite in Iron Winter. There is a devastating, humbling beauty to how Burgess and DP Ben Bryan capture the Mongolian landscape, with our subjects amounting to little more than darkened specks against the blinding white sheet of ice. It’s also quite upfront about the heartbreak of each animal lost along the way, with many shots of horses and foals returning to the earth. It is difficult to look at, but that only adds to the uncompromising tone of the film, where such loss is part of the painful reality of this place and this time.
While Iron Winter mainly covers the climate impact of the larger world on this one spot on the globe, and the trials that must be surpassed to make the voyage, the key notion that pervades the portrayal of the main herders is one of heritage. Of cultural persistence. Of trying to maintain a centuries-long legacy when the world is caught between being transformed by humanity for its own purposes, and what often feels like icy retribution through the increasingly-treacherous weather. More so than any individual living thing, or indeed the planet itself, it posits hard questions on whether a people’s way of life is capable of surviving this. And as Batbold explores his options in the city, and is met with enough gripes about “lacking experience” as to send anyone familiar with the CentreLink system into sympathetic conniptions, that brutal sensation of needing to fight against the world itself on multiple fronts leads to a melancholy so biting as to make even the dzud itself feel like a light breeze.
Iron Winter is as tempered and hardened as its name suggests. It thematically and visually rhymes with The Wolves Always Come at Night, but its specific depiction of the classic struggle between man and nature gives it a sense of soul-rattling awe that more than makes it stand out. Even outside of its quiet and welcome gentle moments (it is the pure humanity of its four main subjects that makes approachable as something to choose to watch), its wider framing as a direct depiction of climate change shifts that particular conversation out of the more abstract ‘years down the line’ terms, and into literal cold reality.
