Kristoffer Juel Poulsen & Christian Als: Daughter of Genghis

… Knud Brix took part in the creation of the film as did producer Andreas Dalsgaard, Elk Film. And many others…

Again it is beautifully demonstrated, how important Time is, when you do documentaries. This film is shot over a period of 8 years, 2015-2023. Things happen during these years for the protagonists Gerel Byamba and her son Temuulen, who is six years old, when we meet him. With a cliché: the camera loves the two and convey through many close-ups expressions – hate, love, sadness – of mother and son.

Gerel hates the Chinese, has formed her own feminist gang that has as its mission to fight prostitution and enter with violence brothels. She uses the swastika, wanting Mongolia to be for Mongolians only, the camera is with her and her gang at a couple of raids. Quite tough to look at.

Paradoxically, Gerel takes a job as security officer at a Chinese railroad project in the Gobi Desert. The son is left in the capital Ulaanbaatar with some family, misses his mother, who tried to get her father take care of the boy. In vain. Slowly the film tells its audience about her childhood, a mother who passed away, while Gerel was a child and a father, who was not present in her life.

The film provides in an excellent way the necessary information to its audience about Mongolia but where it really catches the attention and evokes emotions are in the scenes between mother and son. Especially after she comes back from the job, has saved enough to get a good flat for Temuulen and herself. It is amazing how natural these scenes are, chapeau to the filmmakers for getting that close and for creating poetic moments. The scene where Gerel opens up to tell her son about his father is second to none. It seems like the filmmakers started out to make a journalistic documentary about the nationalistic movement and the anti-chinese thinking, but – as the years went by – focused on mother and son and made that relation THE theme, outstandingly put in the foreground in what is a true creative documentary that took me by the heart,

A strong contender to awards at CPH:DOX.

Denmark and other countries, 2024, 86 mins.