“Filming in Retrospect”: Gabrielle Brady Discusses ‘The Wolves Always Come at Night’

Working as a volunteer nearly two decades ago, Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady lived in and traveled all around Mongolia for 18 months. She returned to the country eight years later to visit some of the herder families that she had stayed with on her travels in the countryside, only to find out that many had moved to the ger districts on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, having lost most, if not all, of their livestock and livelihoods to devastating climate disasters. Hearing their stories and seeing their new lives in the city planted a seed in Brady’s mind, one that eventually grew to become her second hybrid feature, The Wolves Always Come at Night.

A nation of herders without herds on a land without pasture. This is the heartrending view of contemporary Mongolia, some 30 percent of whose population still practice traditional herding, that is presented in Wolves. In the film, Brady has her finger firmly on the pulse of Mongolia’s troubles from anthropogenic climate change and rural-urban migration to economic coercion, all seen through the lived experience of one herder family: Davaa, Zaya, and their four daughters.

To understand her views and practices of hybrid filmmaking, Documentary caught up with Brady over a video call ahead of the film’s world premiere in the Platform competitive section at the TIFF on September 9. The film continues its fall festival run at BFI London and Ulaanbaatar International Film Festival. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: How important was it for the film to be a Mongolian co-production? There are many documentaries shot in Mongolia by people from elsewhere, but usually, there aren’t many Mongolians involved in the production at all, except for fixers, interpreters, and subtitle translators.

GABRIELLE BRADY: Absolutely important. I think there was so much cynicism because there weren’t meaningful roles or exchange but a very outside gaze. What’s interesting about the genesis of this film is that in a way I never set out to make a film in Mongolia. When people started to invite me back to come listen to their stories and start recording them, the first step was to go and visit Ariunaa [Tserenpil, the Mongolian producer] on my first research trip in 2018 out of five or six trips in total. She was actually the first producer attached to the project, so I don’t think the film could be made without that. In our first conversations, I was saying, “This is a bit of a surprise. This is growing. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Does it make sense that I would do this?” I think having those real honest conversations and building an almost all-Mongolian crew around that felt like the first and most crucial step to the film.

D: I find thematic similarities between your two films: Wolves and Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018). What intrigues you about these human-animal-land connections?

GB: That’s really perceptive. I also see so much unity between the two films. In a way, one’s almost an extension of the other. In my time living in Mongolia, I was spending time with people who had a very unfiltered type of connection with landscape and animals. That’s not even to romanticize or glorify it. For me, this was like a revelation. What I was witnessing was people that had no distance, animals that were family members, landscape that was inside of people in a way that I could never understand because I didn’t have that upbringing. I don’t have that connection, but I could observe it. We’re the closest to ourselves when we’re in nature. But I’m still trying to work out what that means. I live in the city. For me, both films weren’t meant to create a judgment. It’s not that the city’s bad and the countryside’s good. We don’t want this kind of neither interesting nor true dichotomy. But what I did want to look at in this microscope is what it actually feels like to transition away and when that distance closes until it’s forgotten. I wanted to create this film that makes a remembrance of closeness. 

D: The title of the film is very intriguing because wolves don’t actually appear in the film. How did you come up with it?

GB: The title actually was part of the origin of the story. It kind of appeared through my writing and investigation, but really it was connected to the stories that I had been witnessing and hearing as a young person when I was staying with all those herder families. The sheer strength of mythology around the wolf: people can sit around for hours on end, discussing the time when they saw one, when one got away, the way they shot it. It appears to people in this kind of larger-than-life, mythological way. And at the same time, wolves were a real danger to herds. But when I started thinking about this very unseen threat, like climate change, it’s so abstract and too big. People can’t even conjure an image. So, there’s this contrast between the mythology of this animal figure that has physicality and realness, but at the same time over the years, it’s been replaced with this other threat that doesn’t yet have a mythology, that doesn’t yet have stories around it. I’m very fascinated by the unseen, what we don’t see, what we feel, but how that manifests in a way as things that are present without having physical form. These were some of the ideas with the title.

D: The two protagonists of the film, Davaa and Zaya, are also given writers’ credits. How did the collaborative process take place between the three of you?

GB: It’s a hybrid film, which is really just a way to describe that it’s not one thing or the other. Of course, even in traditional docs everything’s constructed from the moment you decide what story you’re telling, how you involve people, or how you edit it. So, the hybrid film helps us to have a conversation about the way it was made. It’s such an incredibly exciting form for me. For this film, by the time we were having conversations with people, of course they had already moved to the ger districts. So, the first conversation was, “If we are to film somebody who has gone through this situation, how would we do that?” One option would be to go out in the countryside in storm season, wait for it to happen, then go there and film it. But the idea of approaching someone in the midst of what is probably one of the most traumatic and difficult moments brings up so many ethical complications and questions. The main one is: “Can somebody really give full consent to filming when they are inside of a traumatic moment or situation?” From the beginning, that was absolutely never on the cards.

When we met Davaa and Zaha, they had just moved to the city and straight away Davaa was like, “I want this story told.” We started filming observational material the next day of them moving to a closer part in the ger district. After three weeks of filming and getting to know each other, they made it clear that we needed to go back and film how life was. At that point, it became clear that we’d be filming in retrospect, which means filming after the event of something happening with the creative involvement of the people who witnessed the event. So, we went back to their countryside to film the lead-up to them losing their animals, and that’s really where we started the co-scripting process. Every day we’d have conversations where they would generate ideas and materials. Our scripting was done verbally and nothing was scripted in terms of conversations or dialogue. This was the way we found the dramaturgical thread for the film.

D: Do you think it’s important that the audience be able to differentiate which are the observational parts and which are the constructed ones? Or do you think it doesn’t matter and that the film should be treated as an organic whole? How do you deal with audience expectations of what the form is like?

GB: I think that’s the biggest challenge. I studied at a film school in Cuba, and for the entire first year, there was no fiction or documentary. The idea behind this blurring of genres was that a film is a film. But I also know that audiences have so many different understandings and expectations. Having the word “hybrid” to define that you’ve used both is a kind of a note to the audience to say, “Yes, this is real, these are real people. But we also have used construction to get to these deep emotional moments.” 

There are a lot of hybrid films that make visible their constructions and that’s really valid. But for us, it detracted from the story. The story isn’t how I made the film or me in conversation with Davaa and Zaya. The story is really them and this transition. We want to feel that in its full emotional, heightened sense. But also what’s so beautiful in this film is that even for me or for Davaa and Zaya, it was sometimes unclear what was observational or what was semi-constructed. For example, the scene with Davaa talking to his uncle just before they’re about to leave the countryside is, sure, officially filming in retrospect. But at the same time, that conversation is very real. This wasn’t a performance. It was an opportunity for them to say the words that they never got to when Davaa and Zaya actually first left and it was incredibly emotional for both of them. There’s a real blurring because that’s what we needed to get as close as we could to Davaa and Zaya’s experience.

Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic and PhD student based in Nanjing and Shanghai. His writing has appeared in Cineuropa, Mekong Review, photogénie, among others.