“A Brutal Kind of Beauty”: Kasimir Burgess on His Visions du Réel-Premiering ‘Iron Winter’

In 2024, 7 million livestock died in Mongolia due to what some say was the country’s harshest winter on record. Australian filmmaker Kasimir Burgess witnessed the disaster firsthand while making his third feature documentary, Iron Winter. The film documents two young herders, Batbold and Tsagaanaa, upholding a rural Mongolian tradition of winter herding—protecting horses from severe dzud and wolves by amassing them by the thousands and migrating for several months in search of better pastures.

The slowly disappearing practice serves as a grueling rite of passage for the two herdsmen, but the film avoids exoticizing the tradition and its practitioners. Burgess candidly shows winter herding not just as a way of traditional living but also as a way of making a living, one that involves payments, contracts, and debt between the herders. The events take place on a snow-covered central Mongolian steppe, the brutal beauty of which is captured in one of the most visually striking documentaries in recent years.

Iron Winter will premiere in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel on April 6 and will head to the Melbourne International Film Festival this summer. Ahead of its world premiere, over a video call Burgess shared with Documentary the appeal of the winter herding story, the challenges involved in telling it, and his hopes for what audiences take away from the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: I read that Edward Cavanough, one of the writers of the film, first found out about the practice of winter herding when he was working as a reporter in Mongolia in 2018. How did you join the project? 

KASIMIR BURGESS: I had just made a film on the Franklin River [Franklin, 2022], which was a very difficult physical and logistical challenge. Edward, Ben Golotta, and Morgan Wright [producers], who were friends in a filmmaking family, had seen that film. They needed a director to make the winter herd story, so they pitched me the rough idea and I was immediately interested. We went on a recce to see the landscape, see if a winter herd would be happening, meet the locals and get a sense of whether they even wanted a film. We were very quickly welcomed into the community through a man who became our Mongolian co-producer, Enebish Sengemugaa. We met one particular family, that of Bayankhangai [Batbold’s father], and there was just immediately so much enthusiasm and momentum. 

D: Iron Winter is quite different from your previous two Australia-set feature documentaries, The Leunig Fragments (2019) and Franklin. What was the appeal of the project for you?

KB: Firstly, on a crude level, I thought, “What an adventure!” But what I was really drawn to was this idea of male initiation, which is very much lacking in our own Western culture. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be exciting to find a positive pathway-to-manhood story to show my own son one day?” A story about going into nature and friendship, surviving through adversity, and maybe coming through transformed from boy to man.

Perhaps it could also be our initiation as Westerners over there experiencing this brutal kind of beauty, like a sublime experience that is at once scary and beautiful. It just felt like there’s a disconnect in our culture between humans and nature and that somehow telling this story could get me and maybe the audience closer to seeing how important and crucial animals and nature is. We’re the same thing. To have a story where our characters are immersed in that so deeply was very attractive to me.

D: I think audiences can also feel that “sublime experience” from watching the film. Its cinematography really stood out for me. What were some of the practical challenges with filming in extreme weather? Was it problematic to use drones?

KB: I guess the first thing to say would be that we felt incredibly vulnerable out there, and I felt like we’d underestimated what we would need to survive and just how risky it was. We had a 1920s missile carrier, which would drag a huge tractor tire through the mountains, and 80 Series Land Cruisers just trying to make it through the middle of nowhere where there are no roads. If a dzud comes, then you just have to stay put. And if you’re in your car, then you could freeze. One time we got bogged and we had to walk at night for hours and hours and hours back to the base camp through very deep snow. That was scary to me. 

But the certainty the locals from the valley had in their own abilities to survive was incredible. We were in really good hands, but the hard thing for me was just relaxing into that. Often, the Mongolian way was not planning and controlling everything but submitting to nature. There was a throwing of our Excel spreadsheets on the ground. They were like, “Not here. You use your intuition and your gut. Trust us. We’ve done this for thousands of years.” Once I let go and trusted them, I actually felt a lot more comfortable and secure. 

Condensation was an issue on all of our lenses, drones included, just because it was so warm in our ger and so cold outside, sometimes minus 40 and lower. We had to be very patient but the drones survived surprisingly well. Drones are often overused, but it felt necessary here to convey how isolated and vulnerable they were and also just how vast and beautiful the landscape is. Wherever we point the camera, it’s like a painting. We had beautiful old Russian lenses that helped with a broken-down, distressed kind of look, not a crisp digital Canon look. There’s a grainy, impressionistic kind of feeling which felt right because the ger that we were filming in was hundreds of years old and the clothes they were wearing were so ripped and worn from sweat and bloodstains from all the work. It felt like we could mirror that to some degree. 

D: One thing I really appreciated in the film was how you avoided exoticization in depicting this story. The winter herding practice and the relationship between humans, horses, and nature are dealt with very practically. 

KB: I think initially we maybe did romanticize to some degree this culture that’s under threat. But once I realized it was also a family business and that their livelihood was under threat, it became very relatable. Of course, it was important that we didn’t oversimplify that, and I’m glad that you think we avoided that idea of a noble savage or something. Yes, the boys are being initiated, but they’re also just working and, hopefully, being paid for it. It operates on a number of levels, as you say, as a community service, a job, an initiation. 

D: What’s your expectation of this film’s potential or target audience, if there’s such a thing, and their reception? 

KB: It’d be great if an audience felt transported to this incredibly brutal and beautiful sublime environment. I want them to feel connected and moved by Batbold and Tsagaanaa’s friendship and their plight—the plight of humanity more broadly. It’s to do with climate change and globalization and these herders are at the pointy end of that spear. It’d be nice to have a sense of a shared future, protecting our nature, traditions, and cultures, wherever they might be, rather than just ethnographic othering of people. These boys are just like you and me, they could be anywhere, but they happen to be here in the harshest environment in the world, taking the brunt of the force. 

D: We talk about local stories with universal appeal and I think Iron Winter is a good case of that. But there was one scene in the film that made me think maybe this is aimed more towards international audiences. It’s to do with a subtitle mistranslation. It’s when Batbold and Tsagaanaa are talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of them says in Mongolian, “Russia would take down Ukraine right away,” but the English subtitle reads, “I feel sad for Ukraine.” I thought it was deliberate, especially given that there’s an unusually high number of 15 people credited for the film’s translation and subtitles. It led me to think that maybe when you present a film like this to a global audience, you have to pay attention to these sensitivities because the unfortunate reality is that a lot of Mongolians are very pro-Russia due to historical influence. 

KB: I’m sorry that that has happened. I’m unaware of that. Apologies. Our Mongolian translators may have felt that this was potentially too sensitive. I’m not sure. It definitely wasn’t a deliberate step on our behalf. I’ll push to have the line changed because that doesn’t change the film or subtract in any way. [After our interview, Burgess let Documentary know that he spoke with the producers who agreed to change the subtitles.]

D: Did Batbold eventually find a job in the city? Or did he return to the countryside and maybe even go on another winter herding with Tsagaanaa?

KB: He makes furniture in the city now. I’m not sure he finds that entirely fulfilling, but I don’t know. He loves horses, so to me it does feel somewhat sad that he’s had to leave his town and his nature. But he’s earning a living. Tsagaanaa is actually still working with horses. I don’t think there will be a big winter herd this year, but I’m not entirely sure. I think it was a very hard experience and you can understand why it was put off for those five years or so beforehand because the losses are great. They’re quite vulnerable out there, aren’t they?

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.