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. 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.
Visions du Reel
In the midst of what seems to be endless global turmoil, it’s not surprising that the film program for this year’s Visions du Réel’s was on the sober
How To With John Wilson is an 18-part series of comedic documentary essays framed as tutorials. In each episode, filmmaker John Wilson poses a question that is also the episode title, like How To Make Small Talk or How To Throw Out Your Batteries. The questions are very rarely answered directly, instead offering a free-associative portal into both Wilson’s life and those of the people he meets.
A chance conversation with a friend in London about how we missed attending documentary film festivals resulted—some weeks and intensive planning