Cinema Under Fire: Mongolia

What forces are threatening filmmakers’ freedoms? In a series of contributions from international film critics, Filmkrant reports on the political and economical forces at work on national film production and culture. This month: Mongolia, caught between institutional turbulence and neoliberal encroachment

This year, 2025, marks the 90th anniversary of Mongolia’s film industry, dating back to the establishment of both the Mongol Kino national studio and the People’s Cinema. Various film festivals, academic conferences, filmmaking competitions, and other celebration events are scheduled to take place throughout the year. Yet perhaps the most telling symbol of the industry’s current state is hiding in plain sight.

In downtown Ulaanbaatar stands the building that once housed the People’s Cinema, privatized in the 1990s, and later became a bank that didn’t survive the 2008 financial crisis. Now it sits in ruins, waiting idly for whichever corporation buys it at the highest price to demolish it and erect an office skyscraper that will, as the saying goes, strengthen the economy.

Meanwhile, 2023 marked the most significant year for Mongolian cinema in recent history. Two films – If Only I Could Hibernate by Zoljargal Purevdash and City of Wind by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir – became the first Mongolian features to screen in the official selections at Cannes and Venice, respectively. Talk of a potential “Mongolian New Wave” emerged – understandably, if much prematurely.

I waited with bated breath during the Berlinale press conference that year, but alas no Mongolian title was announced to create a third strike at the “Big Three” European festivals. In fact, no other Mongolian film has made the same journey since then.

The Oscars Controversy
To understand where Mongolian cinema stands today, we need to take a broader look at the state of its film industry. To be sure, the infrastructure is being built and developed. In 2021, Mongolia passed its first law dedicated to promoting film art, which came into effect on January 1, 2022. This was followed by the establishment of both the Mongolian National Film Council (MNFC), under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism, and Youth, and the Film Promotion Fund worth 10 billion tugrug (approximately €2.5 million). Since then, the Council has launched training programs across nearly all sectors of filmmaking, supported local film festivals, and funded productions such as City of Wind through biannual open calls.

Yet, this newly built infrastructure remains fragile and precarious. Whatever amount of goodwill and support the Council initially garnered from film workers and the public quickly eroded following an Oscars-related bureaucratic scandal last September. Despite If Only I Could Hibernate – a coming-of-age drama that focuses on its young protagonist’s balancing act of being a student and a breadwinner in harsh Ulaanbaatar winter—being the only eligible submission for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film that it received, the Council chose not to submit it. Although no official explanation was provided, speculations ranged from personal animosity toward the director to concerns about the film’s alleged negative depiction of the country. Public outrage ensued, a petition was launched, and after several days of intense social media turmoil involving an abundance of accusations and expletives, the Council reversed its decision and submitted Hibernate to the Academy.

That the only other submission the Council received, Silent City Driver by Sengedorj Janchivdorj (which was ineligible per the Academy’s rules since it hadn’t screened in local cinemas), was co-written by a Council member didn’t help with the accusations of conflicts of interest, a lack of professionalism and transparency. Last month, a working group formed by the parliament found several violations in the conduct of the Council, mostly relating to conflicts of interest in selecting local films to be screened abroad and funding allocation, and called for accountability.

In the wake of the controversy, calls to defund the Film Promotion Fund and dissolve the Council grew louder – not just from the public, but also from within the filmmaking community. Those aligned with the rising neoliberal rhetoric in the country seized the opportunity to argue that the government should not be involved in film production at all and that the so-called market alone should determine what gets made and what doesn’t. Needless to say, such an approach essentially means that anything other than commercial filmmaking would cease to exist, threatening the development of film art in Mongolia.

Abuse of Power
Another recent instance where film and politics collided only deepened public mistrust in government institutions. On March 17, eight employees of Noorog Creative Studio, a small but prominent digital media outlet known for producing video content in collaboration with local conglomerates, were detained and interrogated overnight by the Cyber Crime Department. Over the following days, the authorities floated a rotating list of justifications for their actions, citing new grounds and charges ranging from undermining of national unity to organizing online gambling. But the public suspects that the real reason was something entirely different.

When the police initially detained the Noorog employees, they also raided their office and seized their computers and hard drives, which stored footage for a crowdfunded feature documentary that the company has been making since the parliamentary elections the previous summer. Titled 18 Days, the film follows six citizens during the election campaign period, “aiming to expose the strategies and tactics used to sway voters” and contribute to the political education of the public. Following significant public outcry, the police first released the employees, having failed to legally justify the group detention, and returned their equipment several days later. The episode appeared less like a legitimate criminal investigation and more like an attempt to suppress politically sensitive media. Looking at these incidents, it’s no wonder that a recent report by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) named Mongolia as one of six South and Central Asian countries that are autocratizing, and that the country’s RSF World Press Freedom Index has fallen 36 places since 2020, currently ranking 109th out of 180 countries.

“Market Forces”
There are still no film publications in Mongolia. Film discourse is largely limited to short texts on Facebook pages and groups where the boundary between criticism and promotion is at best blurry, at worst non-existent. If a review is positive, audiences think the critic was paid by the studio; if it is negative, the cast and crew hurl insults online. A healthy culture of film criticism – honest, independent, and respected – is still something quite out of reach.

While recent international co-productions have traveled well on the festival circuit, the domestic box office is unsurprisingly dominated by local genre fare. But the situation has somewhat improved compared to a few years ago when the occasional art films would tour festivals abroad but remain largely unknown and inaccessible to local audiences. Hibernate, for example, was the 5th most-watched domestic film in Mongolia last year with over 67 thousand theatrical admissions (Mongolian cinemas only report attendance numbers, not revenue figures).

According to the Cinema Management Association, the sector is projected to expand to 75 screens with 10503 seats by the end of this year, not a small sum for a country with just 3.5 million people. Meanwhile, many filmmakers express dissatisfaction with the high cost of theatrical premieres and exhibition, with many increasingly opting for direct-to-VoD releases. But the streaming platforms come with their own set of challenges. Producers and directors often voice their suspicion of the services’ lack of revenue transparency and even complicity in piracy. Local films are frequently pirated and distributed through social media services such as Telegram within Mongolia and via WeChat in Inner Mongolia, which is home to nearly twice as many ethnic Mongolians. Illegal screenings of foreign films with Mongolian subtitles are rampant in pubs, cafes, and restaurants in Ulaanbaatar where owners charge for entry.

In contrast, legitimate efforts to diversify cinematic offerings face uphill battles. Sayan Pictures, a new production and distribution company, started bringing to Mongolian screens critically acclaimed festival titles such as Anatomy of a Murder and Only the River Flows. While a welcome boon to the country’s few cinephiles, these efforts seem to have resulted in substantial financial loss for the company, which now has partially shifted its focus to bringing South East Asian erotic films to streaming platforms.

Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic, programmer and researcher based in Nanjing and Ulaanbaatar, whose work has been published in Die Welt, Cineuropa and photogénie.

A Dutch translation of this article was published in Filmkrant #479, May 2025.