Kasimir Burgess

For you as a filmmaker, Kasimir, you and the crew, what was your daily life like while you were on location?

A lot of the filming is very intimate scenes, you know, the two friends talking together inside the Gur or standing next to one another out on the step.

How did you do that so it wasn't intrusive or how did you encourage that feeling of real sort of ease and intimacy that are there between the two boys in this film?

Well, I wanted to ask you about language because given that you don't speak Mongolian, how did you know when you were recording whether they were saying something significant or what was happening in terms of the story development between those characters?

There's a lot of talk about rebirth in Iron Winter, about the horse's rebirth or human rebirth.

It does seem to be a culture which is really infused with a kind of reverence and spirituality.

You weren't herding horses across minus 50 in a frozen step either, Cassavere.

Tell me about the horses that they're herding.

They're giving them lots of haircuts in the film too.

What's that about?

As the winter progressed, what kind of conditions were you and these young men and their horses facing?

How did the young men feel about you filming that part of their journey when horses were dying from the cold and starvation?

For you, Casimir, what was it like to be out there when those storms hit and that temperature was plummeting in that way?

What was it like?

When those really heavy, huge storms would hit, what did it sound like?

Have Batwold and Sagana seen the finished film?

What about your own growing up, Kasimir?

How did your growing up compare to life on the Mongolian steppes?

Wherever it was, it must have been warmer.

What had drawn your mum and dad to that part of Melbourne, to Richmond?