Amarsanaa Battulga

3 weeks ago | documentary.org | Amarsanaa Battulga

When does childhood end? This slippery question becomes the crux of Chinese filmmaker Deming Chen’s second feature documentary, Always. The film, which won the top prizes at CPH:DOX and Jeonju over the past two months, centers on an 8-year-old boy, Gong Youbin, and his family in a small village in southern China’s Hunan province. Gong’s father lost an arm in an accident, shortly after which his mother left them when Gong was just a few months old.

2 months ago | documentary.org | Amarsanaa Battulga

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.

2 months ago | documentary.org | Amarsanaa Battulga

The closing night party at West Lake IDF. Courtesy of West Lake IDF Although few people outside China have heard of it, the West Lake International Documentary Festival—locally known as IDF, which stands for “I Documentary Fact”—has quickly become the country’s leading documentary festival since its inception in 2017.

Oct 13, 2024 | easternkicks.com | Amarsanaa Battulga

Chinese Sixth Generation auteur Jia Zhangke at his most experimental and romantic…Ever the chronicler of the marginal downtrodden grassroots in China, the Sixth-Generation auteur Jia Zhangke returns to familiar subject matters and themes in his latest, Caught by the Tides. However, what makes this film stand out is how he does it, so much so that the programmers at the Hawai’i International Film Festival, where the film screens this week, categorized it as “experimental.”The reason is simple.

Oct 7, 2024 | documentary.org | Amarsanaa Battulga

Working as a volunteer nearly two decades ago, Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady lived in and traveled all around Mongolia for 18 months. She returned to the country eight years later to visit some of the herder families that she had stayed with on her travels in the countryside, only to find out that many had moved to the ger districts on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, having lost most, if not all, of their livestock and livelihoods to devastating climate disasters.