The live-editing workshop is an integral part of each year’s Critics Campus, and this year, four members of the cohort were assigned Kasimir Burgess’s moving Mongolian-set documentary Iron Winter. After penning their reviews, the participants sat through an intensive revision session with critic and Rough Cut managing editor Indigo Bailey. Read their final reviews below.

By Monique Nair

“Humans are far more dangerous than wolves” is a claim introduced early in Iron Winter, the new documentary by Kasimir Burgess (Franklin, MIFF 2022; The Leunig Fragments, MIFF 2019), in which young Mongolian men herd horses across the Tsakhir Valley during the country’s deadliest season. While the film is a testament to human endurance in the face of natural hardship, man-made forces are shown to be a greater threat.

The ancient practice of herding horses into grazable pastures halted in recent years due to severe weather patterns. Iron Winter documents one community’s revival of this tradition. Two young friends, Batbold and Tsagana, embark on an icy four-month journey into a vast mountain range, entrusted with 2000 horses. They are guided by experienced community elders, including Batbold’s father, initiating the younger men into a rite of passage in danger of being lost.

The film oscillates between the high stakes of the journey and lighter moments. Majestic drone shots of snow-laden mountains reveal the epic scale of their feat. Harrowing visions of skeletal horses frozen to death in the snow haunt us long after they have left the frame. But Iron Winter’s focus on tender relationships cuts through the density to create a sense of vitality and warmth. There are moments when Batbold and Tsagana playfully wrestle together, cut horses’ manes, pose for Facebook photos standing atop a horse and share hearty meals buoyed by existential conversations with elders.

The propulsive pacing keeps up with the momentum of the journey, making it easier for the audience to be drawn in. How far will they travel today? Will the wolves’ piercing cries echo in the dark? How many horses will survive the night? Will Batbold nail that new horseriding skill for the end-of-herding community celebration? With a running time of 90 minutes, the film is not a lingering account, but it captures the rhythms of the pair’s expedition.

Iron Winter is the second Australian documentary in recent years to centre on Mongolia’s nomadic population, following 2024’s The Wolves Always Come at Night, directed by Gabrielle Brady (Island of Hungry Ghosts, MIFF 2018). While they tell different stories, the films share a common cause and some stylistic elements. Immersive observational snapshots are co-constructed with their subjects to evoke compassion for the lives most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Both respond to the country’s devastating pattern of severe droughts and catastrophic winters, which has left over seven million livestock dead – placing the future of this nomadic way of life further in jeopardy.

Scenes deep in the mountains offer a fierce contrast to the images that close the film: an isolated Batbold sits hunched in a cramped room, looking out on a grey and congested city. He has chosen to move to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, yet struggles to find work and feels “caught in a trap”. His momentous initiation has ended, but we are left with uncertainty about his future as well as that of his community’s traditions and lives.

By Claire Ollivain

We are all familiar with the tropes of the cowboy western: lone rangers on horseback, lawlessness on the colonial frontier, the uninviting dusty terrain of the American West. The genre has played a decisive role in welding the values of freedom and individualism onto the mythology of US imperialism. But the western can also be subverted, its model altered to tell stories that surprise us.

Australian documentary Iron Winter, directed by Kasimir Burgess, is not a film that announces itself as a twist on the western, but it nonetheless subtly undermines the genre’s codes with comparable imagery. Following the epic adventure of a pair of Mongolian young men herding 2000 horses through the freezing Tsakhir Valley, Iron Winter is about the preservation of ancestral traditions. The documentary’s subject Batbold and his friend Tsagana fight for the survival of their herd against wolf attacks, unforgiving storms and starvation in extreme winter. In Mongolia, the horse is a national symbol of independence, endurance and deep connection to the land. With the ancient practice of horse herding now nearing extinction, the film offers a compelling exegesis of cultural safeguarding.

Iron Winter’s tale locates its horsemen’s sources of adversity not just in the icy plains, but in the modern world and climate disaster. The film explores Mongolia’s extreme ‘iron winter’ – the changing weather that is putting nomadic herding communities in peril – as a challenge that initiates 18-year-old Batbold’s entry into manhood. Through panoramic shots depicting the horses as specks against the white backdrop of the towering mountains, cinematographer Benjamin Bryan draws on sublime images of nature to emphasise the young men’s tremendous resilience. The filmmakers upend the conventions of the western by foregrounding a relationship to nature based on connection rather than conquest. Iron Winter also offers a more nuanced model of masculinity than the rugged cowboy. In moments of joy and intimacy, Batbold and Tsagana ride their horses while attempting to pick up uurgas (lasso poles) off the ground, give each other and the horses haircuts, and reflect meaningfully on whether they are stuck in the past.

In the film’s third act, Batbold is thrust into the city, where he must navigate the difficulties of the modern world. He struggles to find work in a society that doesn’t value herding as a marketable skill. The visual contrast between this and earlier sections is disorienting, but the way they are edited barely shifts. I left the cinema wishing that Iron Winter had brought us more forcefully into the four-month experience of time passing in the valley, especially since the young men discuss its slowness. The film rarely lingers on shots for a sustained length of time; when it does, however, it draws us in, showcasing the beauty of the scenery and transporting us into the subjects’ own quiet reflection and patience.

Iron Winter relies heavily on montage to show images of the horses collapsed in the snow and to signal the crisis unfolding. But the length of the voyage is condensed into a tight construction that is, perhaps, too easy for us to digest.

By Thomas Phillips

For the Mongolian horse herders in the documentary Iron Winter, climatic chaos is ever-escalating. As grasslands freeze and storms gather, the subjects take on the perilous challenge of guiding their livestock to greener pastures. The ensuing journey is shot through with a propulsive pace that immerses viewers in the film’s kinetic vitality, even if its schematic story beats occasionally detour into the well-trodden territory of pastoral idealism.

For centuries, the men of the Tsakhir Valley have undertaken this journey to save their communities’ horses from starvation when winter falls. But as climate change and economic downturn beckon more herders towards urban centres, the custom is at risk of disappearing forever. For 18-year-old Batbold, the process doubles as a rite of passage. “How hard can it be?” he asks as he sets out with his older friend Tsagana and father Bayankhangai. The answer comes during his first night watch, which involves safeguarding the herd from predators after sundown. Torchlit horses gallop across a lens-flared screen as wolves howl in the distance, evoking a horror movie disorientation that feels energising rather than rote.

Iron Winter builds a cyclical rhythm once these night watches become routine, alongside processes like setting up camp, herding horses and occasional wrestling matches, until pastures deteriorate and they start the process anew. But routine doesn’t equate to monotony, and stakes escalate across the film’s taut 90-minute running time. After Tsagana’s lasso pole breaks (a bad omen), they’re visited by a messenger with troubling news from the outside world: a blizzard is encroaching, and wolves are growing more aggressive with the coming mating season. The transition is accompanied by rising death counts – the grim accounting of which is shown via shaky POV phone footage – but Batbold and his companions maintain momentum regardless.

Although these horsemen command the screen, this throughline of idealised resilience occasionally gives them the predetermined qualities of chess pieces rather than fully realised individuals. They feel pushed along the trajectory of a coming-of-age hero’s journey against a backdrop of an urban fantasy of the rural.

The heightened, cinematic register of Iron Winter doesn’t require journalistic fidelity, but the visible seams are at times distracting, its subjects’ expositional discussions too suggestive of direction. Less apparent to English-speaking audiences might be a reported inaccuracy in the film’s subtitles – Mongolian critic Amarsanaa Battulga points out a mistranslation that suggests sympathy for Ukraine during a value-neutral moment of dialogue about Russia between the two young herders.

Imposed notions become more explicit when the film finally enters the inner-city environment of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, where familiar indicators of urban malaise permeate, captured under bleak indoor lighting with an atomised subjectivity. Although much of the film is buoyed by more lyrically expressed observations, it’s in moments like these that it feels too constrained by preconceptions.

By Armani Hollindale

A lot of filmmakers insist the making of their film was an absolute nightmare. But few present a work that can match these stakes.

What began as a journalism piece for co-writer Ed Cavanough quickly took on a scale that demanded the medium of film. In the hands of documentarian Kasimir Burgess, the subject transformed into a coming-of-age story following two young men, Batbold and Tsagana, entrusted with the Mongolian tradition of herding and protecting 2000 horses across the icy Tsakhir Valley. Over four months, the conditions of the journey grow increasingly severe and unpredictable. Meanwhile, as the tradition is being lost among new generations, the wisdom bestowed by elders is on the brink of collapse.

Iron Winter endeavours to present this rite of passage as a parable for a greater global crisis, but does so by neatly packaging the stages of the odyssey with an unnerving air of rehearsal. Despite the undoubtedly challenging process of shooting on the treacherous landscape, the resulting picture is a polite rendering – loaded images assembled for a safe delivery. As the pensive music intensifies, rare and stunning visuals submit to a commercially developed vision of optimism against despair.

Tidy snapshots of this lengthy journey cannot bear the weight of this centuries-old tradition nor the vastness of the Mongolian steppes. If this film seeks to contribute to the process of cultural reignition and preservation, it owes its origin a similar courage in presenting the true wages of the experience. There is more to the cold than dry skin – it bleeds, and your knees and ankles give way as you dismount a horse. Time is always working against you. In the gaze of an animal, you might see immense pain. But Burgess’s camera always cuts away, giving the audience relief too soon and never getting the chance to sink into anything.

While this dissonant calm allows Iron Winter to maintain a tone of solidarity, viewers deserve more in the face of such brutality. The screen time could have certainly afforded more of the small, abandoned details of the young men’s difficulties, which would have elevated the story by “playing with [the] chaos” to which the filmmakers testified so passionately during the Q&A following the film’s second MIFF screening.

The opportunity for emotional resonance is sabotaged by repeated attempts to drive symbolic meanings home. Musings and teachings are dictated in dialogue, often as personifications of the landscape, or as radical questions about the afterlife, staging moments for introspection or the grandiose. This didactic discourse operates within a value system premised on obedience: respect, responsibility and resilience. Rituals and celebrations are cited without the requisite cultural context – the suffering of horses for tradition or for pleasure; the deep symbolic meaning held by hair; how food and shelter are catalysts for warmth and camaraderie – giving way to possible confusion. As polished metaphors, these create little friction with the viewer. Elsewhere, conversations about masculinity, cultural identity and heritage are gentle and surface-scratching.

The subject matter of Iron Winter is one that demands to be told, but you sense the carefulness of a voice wanting to present a story of urgency to investors. We can only hope Burgess loosens his grip when softening the edges of subsequent work in this genre.

Iron Winter screens in Melbourne on Saturday 9, Monday 11 and Saturday 23 August and in regional Victoria on Saturday 16, Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinions expressed are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect that of the festival.