Moviemaking at -50 degrees. The Australian film crew that survived one of the world’s deadliest winters

Australian filmmaker Kasimir Burgess knew it would be brutally difficult shooting a documentary about an ancient Mongolian tradition: the annual migration of thousands of horses from the remote Tsaikhir Valley to winter pastures.

How could it be anything else? Temperatures in the stark, treeless valley, 800 kilometres west of the capital, Ulaanbaatar, could drop below minus 40 degrees centigrade, there’d be no communication with the outside world for much of the shoot, and wolves would stalk the horses that two young friends, the shy Batbold, 19, and the more self-assured Tsagana, 22, were guiding through high-altitude snow country for five months.

In a country where 300,000 of the 3.5-million population are herders, combining horses into a winter herd is a way of preserving a family’s most valuable possession and protecting pastures at home for cattle, yaks and other animals. For the young herders, being entrusted with them was a rite of passage.

But early in the main shoot, Burgess thought making Iron Winter had become downright impossible. After considering using Snowcat-style vehicles to follow the herders, Burgess and his Australian crew took their Mongolian counterparts’ wise advice to use two 80 Series Toyota Land Cruisers, as the Mongolians knew how to fix them when they broke down. The plan was that a Soviet-era military truck that was “like something out of Mad Max” would lead the way to base camp, dragging a tractor tyre to clear a path for the Land Cruisers through the snow. But after leaving the Tsaikhir township, the Iron Winter crew found they could not get over an icy mountain pass to reach the herders on the winter migration.

For days, the Land Cruisers battled deep snow. Each time they got bogged, the crew would dig them out, then 30 minutes later, they’d get bogged again. And again. The exhausted crew tried different routes but failed to make it over the pass.

One evening, Burgess returned to their base camp to find a yak – “a huge, gentle presence” – sleeping in the doorway of their ger (circular Mongolian tent) seeking warmth. “Talking to it became strangely grounding,” he says. “At night, we’d have to coax it away from the door just to step outside. Each day we attempted the pass and failed – the slope almost vertical, the ice unforgiving – and each night we returned to find the yak waiting for us, as if keeping watch.”

After another day of upsetting failure, Burgess -returned to camp to find the yak struggling to breathe. “It was slowly dying,” he says. “I lay beside it for over an hour as its breathing became less frequent. Something about that rhythm – the waiting between breaths – took me back to my mother’s final hour. Holding that animal as it died, I cried for it, for my mum and for the frustration and grief that had been building inside all of us.”

That was the point that Burgess realised the film was unravelling. The crew were using up their fuel, food and shooting time with nothing to show for it.

There were also tensions between the Australians, the Mongolians from the valley and those from Ulaanbaatar. Cultural differences had emerged about how to proceed. “The information that we were disseminating to the team in Excel spreadsheets – for food, fuel reports, etc – I’d find those in the mud, just stepped upon in the snow,” Burgess says. The film was turning into a Mongolian version of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the famous 1991 documentary about the chaos as Francis Ford Coppola shot 1979’s Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.

But the day after the yak’s death, the crew finally worked out how to get the Land Cruisers over the pass. Using tow cables, they hauled them up one by one in a tug-of-war against gravity, deep snow and ice. “Something shifted,” Burgess says. “The team put aside differences and worked together, literally pulling the vehicles up the mountain by hand. When we finally reached the top, we celebrated with vodka: exhausted, bonded, relieved. That small victory brought clarity and momentum. That night, we were reunited with the herders and, from that point on, the film truly began.”

While the challenges were far from over, the small miracle is that the Hearts of Darkness-like trials of making Iron Winter has resulted in a stunning documentary that has been winning international awards since it premiered last year.

When cinematographer Benjamin Bryan became the first Australian to win the coveted feature documentary prize at Camerimage in Poland, the jury said they were “awestruck by the boldly exquisite visual language [in what was] documentary filmmaking at its most artful and humane”.

Burgess, 45, is a sculptor turned writer-director who has shot films in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, remote Aboriginal communities and on the wild Franklin River in Tasmania. His 2014​ ​feature drama Fell had a career​-best performance by Matt Nable as a man working through grief.

Burgess came to make Iron Winter after producers Ben Golotta and Morgan Wright showed him and his longtime producer Chris Kamen a 2022 Al Jazeera article by Australian journalist Edward Cavanough about how climate change had stopped Tsaikhir Valley herders holding the winter migration for the first time in 2019. Extreme, unpredictable weather had made it too dangerous. But one family wanted to revive it, seeing it as an important cultural tradition for both horses and young herders.

“It grabbed me on a number of levels,” Burgess says. “My interest in the environment, as a tradition that was under threat and, having a son, as a ‘positive pathway to manhood’ story. And it was a big adventure. It promised months in another culture, immersed in nature. But it was quite a naive enthusiasm.”

On a recce trip to Mongolia, Burgess – who lives in Preston in Melbourne’s north-east with partner Shari Boyanton and children Lotte, 10, and Arlo, 7 – met community elders, who were worried the Australians might be risking their lives following the herd. “They were pragmatic; ‘How are you going to survive?’ ” he says. “A big one for them – and there was some laughter around this – was how would our pointy noses not freeze and fall off?”

That worry aside, the elders were keen that their sacred tradition be filmed for the world to see. After five weeks of autumn filming in late 2023, the Australians returned early in the new year for a seven-week shoot in what became one of Mongolia’s most savage winters. As temperatures reached minus 50, the horses struggled to break the ice to find pasture. They grew thinner and some died, upsetting the young herders who had a close bond to the horses and were worried they would be blamed.

The film’s Mongolian co-producer, creative adviser and cultural consultant, Enebish Sengemugaa, says from Tsaikhir that horses have a special place in the country’s culture. “If we didn’t have horses, Mongolia wouldn’t exist,” he says. “No Mongolian history, no culture, nothing.”

Sengemugaa, whose usual job is taking horse-riding tours, explains the cultural differences that made the shoot tough. “Mongolian planning is, ‘This is what we’ll do in September’, not ‘Tuesday, two o’clock’, because Mother Nature changes things,” he says. “Nature -decides more than humans, especially in winter.”

Bryan, the award-winning cinematographer, says the shoot was physically challenging “with the cold and just the sheer weight of the layers that you had to put on every morning to get out the door. But mentally, just being so far away from family [he has two young children] for an extended period of time was really tough as well. [We] really had to support each other.”

Burgess says the filmmakers suffered alongside the young herders, sharing despair, exhaustion, doubt, uncertainty and grief for the dying horses. Indeed, that winter was so severe that ultimately, it killed 7.4 million horses, cattle, yaks and other animals across Mongolia, and left thousands of herders impoverished and displaced. But during the filming process, there were also some joyful moments as they laughed around the fire, fell under the spell of the country and discovered their resilience.

To make the film, they had to adapt to the Mongolian way of doing things. “The local knowledge and the connection to land and the animal kingdom was what helped us to survive and eventually gather enough ingredients to tell the story,” Burgess says. “Each night we’d have a big circle meeting where everyone’s perspective would be taken into account before a group consensus about how to proceed the next day.”

While the young herders were Westernised enough to have smartphones and miss chatting with girls on Facebook, they realised how resourceful they were, restarted an ancient tradition and inspired the filmmakers during the winter herd. “These boys were using 400-year-old gers made by their forefathers and were learning skills that had been handed down since well before Genghis Khan,” Burgess says. “There was this incredible sense of privilege to be living through something so extreme and so historical.”

Eventually, they all survived one of Mongolia’s most brutal winters. They also made an outstanding film. And the Australians’ pointy noses did not fall off.

Iron Winter opens in cinemas on March 19.

Get the best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.

Read more by Garry Maddox:
‘There were a few lost years’: Geoffrey Rush is back. But don’t call it a comeback
Stranger Things star launches Australian filmmaking career
Why Heather Mitchell is reinventing her career