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Chapter 1: What ancient tradition of horse migration is explored in this episode?
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Genghis Khan apparently said it's easy to conquer the world from the back of a horse, and the founder of the Mongol Empire did just that. Horses and horsemanship continue to be central to Mongolian culture and identity. For Mongolians, horses have a deep spiritual significance, and it is a mark of a person's character how well they treat their horses. Winter in Mongolia is brutal.
Temperatures can plummet to minus 50 degrees.
Chapter 2: How do Mongolian horses hold cultural significance?
And for centuries, there's been a tradition of small groups of herders bringing horses to fresh pastures. And it's a rite of passage for Mongolian nomads, one which demands phenomenal survival skills and incredible grit.
A new Australian documentary called Iron Winter follows two young horse herders in their four-month journey with thousands of horses across the beautiful but unforgiving Mongolian steppes. It's directed by Casimir Burgess. Hi, Casimir.
Hi, Sarah.
How did you hear about this Mongolian tradition of the winter horse migration in the first place?
Yeah, look, it's a rather convoluted story, but I sold the camera to a young Adelaide producer and we got chatting and became kind of mates and I said, oh, give me a buzz if you ever want to talk film and have a project you want to jam on.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do young herders face during the brutal winter?
And two years later he called me and he said, my camera's been stolen or your camera's been stolen, the one you sold me, and I've got a project going. A couple of thousand horses, he said, every year since time immemorial are taken by several young boys and they take them on a vast journey in search of pasture. And there's a community in Mongolia who are considering doing this again.
It's been off for six years, but one family wants to bring it back. And I was immediately interested. And after looking at some of his incredible visuals that he'd taken on a trip there with journalist Edward Kavanaugh, who wrote an article on the story, I was kind of hooked. And I asked if I could direct the film.
What was it that hooked you, Casimir?
Look, I think there was something mythic about this journey. There was something like a fable, but there was also some tension, some beautiful but difficult tension in these young boys who were deciding between the modern world and an ancient world. Something that it seemed was kind of tearing them apart because this tradition is under threat. Most young people are moving for the city.
They see that as an easier life. But there was a couple of boys who wanted to keep the tradition alive, who wanted to do something that their forefathers had done for hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of years.
So tell me about these two young men whose story your film focuses. What were they like the first time you met them?
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Chapter 4: How did the herders' families react to the filming project?
What impression did you get?
Yeah, Buttvolt was quiet and soulful and very watchful, a bit younger than Sagana. So he was 19, Sagana was 21. Sagana was very expressive and had a bravado, you know, a big baseball hat and a swagger. So Buttvolt was kind of in his shadow a little bit, but I could feel that his waters ran deep, if you will.
So it felt to me instinctively almost from the moment that I spoke to Bart Volt that he would be at the centre of the film.
Where physically did you first meet them, Casimir?
It was in a gur. Well, in fact, we waited for them in a gur like at... ancient sort of tent, a yurt. And yeah, 10 hours of waiting. And they appeared on the horizon on horseback and just side by side, almost in lockstep. And they rode towards us. It was quite a film worthy entry.
Is waiting for 10 hours something that happens often when you're dealing with Mongolian culture?
I think so. They call it Mongolian time and you just have to be patient. And, you know, I'll see you tomorrow at midday could mean the day after or several days. And the distances are so vast that, you know, there could be many good reasons that it takes that long, that those 10 hours, you know, they won't talk about it necessarily and there's no apology.
It's just that's what it is, different relationship to time and distance.
What did these young men's families think about your idea of filming them on this epic migration?
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Chapter 5: Why did filmmaker Kasimir Burgess decide to document this journey?
Yeah, there was a lot of enthusiasm, yes, for it to happen, but they're like, how? You know, this is very hard for us and we're inured to it. How will you manage when the temperature drops to minus 20 and 30 and 40 and 50? And will your noses fall off?
Will your noses fall off? Why is that?
Yeah.
I guess they're more exposed. It was interesting to pinpoint a body part, but it's true, you know, and we had to wear often special masks to protect our long pointy noses.
Well, when you went back in early 2024 to begin filming the migration itself, the boys were already off with the herd of horses. How did you go about finding them?
It was much harder than we'd imagined to find them. locatable on our GPS on a little device we had with them, but they were so far away and there was this huge pass between us and them that we just couldn't make. And so we were stuck at a base camp that we'd set up.
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Chapter 6: What hardships did the crew encounter while filming in Mongolia?
And each day we attempted this pass again in our two 80 series land cruisers and a 1920s Russian missile carrier, which just dragged a huge tractor tire behind it to make a little semblance of road. because we were so far from civilization. You know, the tiny town we'd come from was a good day's drive, and we just kept getting bogged, and we kept sliding back this mountain, which was very high.
You know, the air was thin up there, and it was probably, yeah, minus 40 that week. So... We ended up, yeah, almost giving up, I guess. Each day we would come back to base camp with a great deal of despair. You really want to get to the herders and each day you have there is so precious.
So it felt as though we would never reach them and it felt like a lost in La Mancha or a, you know, Fitzcarraldo or something.
It was... A film about something not happening rather than something happening. How did you manage to make it over that pass eventually? Exactly.
Look, there was a yak that kind of gave us solace at night. It felt like I was home with a pet and that I think kept us a little grounded. But logistically we managed to get the cars up and over the hill just by hand. So the whole team came together and just hand over hand, inch by inch until we managed those really steep parts. It was the only thing left to try and it worked thankfully.
Once you managed to meet up with these young herders, how had the migration been going? What sort of mood were they in?
At that point, they were still in high spirits. The toll of winter, it just hadn't taken its toll. It was new and they were excited. And the two elders were with them, Zizere and Baynhange. Baynhange is Buttvolt's father and Zizere is the uncle. And they were very supportive. So, yeah, it was like... the start of winter, and still cold and brutal, but they hadn't experienced losses yet.
What did the landscape look like, Kasimir?
It's very beautiful, incredibly stark, treeless, almost lunar landscape, very bright often with that blue, piercingly blue, famously blue Mongolian sky. And, yeah, it takes your breath away. Yeah. As Ben said, it's hard to get a dud. Our cinematographer, Ben Bryan, it's hard to get a dud frame out here. It just opens up to eternity and it frees your soul somewhat.
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Chapter 7: How did the extreme weather impact the horses and herders?
And you could see all the beautiful little scars and the little bits of ancient graffiti in the cross sections, beautiful wooden made light timber that they could pack onto their horses. And it would take probably an hour to set up. And there would be a little fireplace that would also go on the back of the horse with a chimney. and that was vital to keep them warm and to not freeze alive.
Given the extraordinary temperatures, are they warm inside that little shelter?
Yeah, they can get incredibly warm. So it was one thing that I struggled with was coming from minus 50 to plus 30 in that space and trying to film in that space was really tricky for Ben, Brian and I and sometimes the sound recordist.
Give me more of a sense of their day-to-day life when they're out there with the horses. What do they eat? Where do they go to the bathroom? How do you live in somewhere as extreme as that?
Yeah, well, I guess it's, as my son calls it, a bush wee.
There's no bush. That's right. It's a step wee.
Well, there's no step wee. There's nowhere to hide. So, you know, whenever we needed to go to the toilet, you're on full display. I guess their routine is, you know, you muster the horses, you bring them together. At the start of winter, they're much more spread out.
And as it gets colder and colder, the horses, you know, come tighter and tighter together until they're in a sort of perfect mandala circle from above. and that's for their protection. The herders will sort of initiate that and bring them together, but it felt like eventually the horses were naturally forming in that pattern so that the collective warmth will keep them alive.
And the boys will take it in turns. They'll watch all night long and shoot wolves as they come, alone or in packs. And, yeah, walk amongst the horses and soothe them if they need to, sing to them. The herders will have a big breakfast, oats and some things that they carry and sort of staples that they carry on the back of the horse.
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Chapter 8: What emotional connections did Kasimir Burgess form during the filming?
we went without cards or batteries and sometimes food as well. And the herders observed this and they started giving us some of their food if they had enough. And as horses began to die, actually, we ate horse meat, which was incredibly confronting and our bodies really didn't agree with it. But, you know, it kept everyone alive.
And it certainly wasn't as though they were killing horses to eat them. It was just this is possible sustenance from an animal that has died.
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?
they just didn't seem to be self-conscious and I think it it felt like a lot of Mongolians we met were just so centered and sort of they knew themselves in some way even the boys in a way they had a confidence and the camera didn't didn't throw them but also I think just spending so many days and so many hundreds of hours with them they just get used to you and And that was important.
But we would start the day in a little huddle, you know, nose to nose, forehead to forehead. It was quite intimate. And although we weren't speaking the same language, we learned to speak often without words and with gestures and smiles and cheeky twinkling eyes. You know, there was a lot of communication that it felt as though we were talking.
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?
Well, the honest truth is often we didn't know what they were saying. Oftentimes we would have a translator there and they were, you know, in my ear. NA would be like, this is great. You know, he might not even give me any details on it, but he's just like, just make sure you press record on this one.
And, yeah, I guess it was just a sense of gravitas that they would bring that you could hear, you learnt to read. But, yeah, also N.A. translating or Eric translating, they were giving you little synopsis like, yeah, this is about, you know, the spirits in the sky or this is about the need to crack a goat's jaw to allow for its spirit to reincarnate. you know, little things like this.
And then you get back into the edit and the things you thought were most profound are not. They're just, you know, making fun of, you know, my haircut that particular day. Or maybe, yeah, but the opposite was true as well. Sometimes something would just be said in such a poetic, beautiful way and they speak often in a way that's epic and mythic. just hits the spot like a little haiku.
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