Iron Winter is a 2025 Australian feature-length documentary film about Mongolian horse-herders, directed by Kasimir Burgess. The film 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, capturing the herders' 150-day struggle to lead thousands of horses into the high country in search of edible grass hidden under the snow.
Two young horse-herders, Batbold, aged 18, and Tsagana, aged 22, herd around 2000 animals across the Tsaikhir Valley in the Mongolian Steppes in the depths of a bitterly cold winter, learning the traditional ways of their fathers while having one foot in the modern world. The practice is diminishing owing to climate change and young Mongolians moving to the cities for work.
The timing of the project proved devastating in scope. 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. Rather than sensationalising the crisis, the film documents two young herders upholding a rural Mongolian tradition of winter herding and avoiding exoticizing the tradition and its practitioners.
Burgess candidly shows winter herding not just as a way of traditional living but also as a way of making a living, one that involves payments, contracts, and debt between the herders. This approach grounds the story in economic reality rather than romantic notions of nomadic life.
The production itself presented extraordinary challenges. Director Kasimir Burgess spent months in extreme conditions, in temperatures of minus fifty degrees Celsius, in order to develop a meaningful collaboration with the young herders. The film is produced by Adelaide filmmakers Ben Golotta and Morgan Wright of Repeater Productions, who travelled with and filmed two horse herders in winter 2023 herding around 2000 animals across the Tsaikhir Valley in a traditional journey to take the horses to safer grazing.
Iron Winter has been selected for the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel International Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland, with its world premiere at the festival running from April 4-13, 2025. Iron Winter will premiere in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel on April 6 and will head to the Melbourne International Film Festival this summer.
For countless generations, the herders of the Tsakhir Valley have protected their horses from ferocious arctic storms by amassing a giant winter herd, nominating their bravest young men to protect it. As climate pressure and economic opportunity draw young Mongolians away from pastoral life, documentaries such as this serve as both record and lament for traditions that may not survive another generation.