Iron Winter

Iron Winter (2025)

Iron Winter follows two young Mongolian horse herders who battle extreme winter cold to protect an ancient tradition that risks being lost forever. Set in the Tsakhir Valley of the Arkhangai province, one of the world's harshest human-inhabited environments, the film captures the herders' 150-day struggle to lead thousands of horses into the high country in search of edible grass hidden under the snow.

Date of release
2025-11-21
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Kasimir Burgess

Casting

Interesting facts

Iron Winter is a 2025 Australian feature-length documentary film about Mongolian horse-herders, directed by Kasimir Burgess.

Production

Iron Winter is produced by Adelaide filmmakers Ben Golotta and Morgan Wright of Repeater Productions. In winter 2023, they travelled with and filmed two horse herders, Batbold, aged 18, and Tsagana, aged 22, herding around 2000 animals across the Tsaikhir Valley, Mongolia, in a traditional journey to take the horses to safer grazing. The practice is diminishing owing to climate change and young Mongolians moving to the cities for work.

Golotta had studied sound engineering and music in London and Copenhagen before joining Wright at Repeater Productions, which started off producing only sound, but over the course of nine years expanded into making short films and music videos.

To make Iron Winter, Golotta and Wright recruited their friend Kasimir Burgess, a director based in Melbourne, and cinematographer Benjamin Bryan. Bryan and senior producer Chris Kamen had both worked with Burgess on the 2022 feature documentary Franklin, the highest grossing documentary of that year. This led to obtaining funding from Screen Australia, VicScreen, and the Melbourne International Film Festival Premier Fund.

The team made a short film about the herders which screened at the International Documentary Conference in Melbourne, and won the Sheffield DocFest Prize.

The film was co-written by journalist Ed Cavanough and Enebish Sengemugaa, and co-edited by Burgess and Kenny Ang. Music was by Luke Altmann.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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