Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Strong and Moving!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Superbly done! I felt captivated from the start. This film does a great job of following race contestants, and feeling connected to such an otherworldly place. I felt like a virtual participant in a great adventure. I was fully entertained from start to finish. What more can you ask of a film? Mongolia is now a destination on my bucket list.

An astonishingly beautiful and amazingly done film. Maloh manages to capture the drama, tension and ambition of the race but also the vulnerability of some of the participants. Always subtle, he hints at the different experiences that led them to take up the challenge. The interactions between the racers and Mongolians are marked by polite awkwardness, which Maloh's camera catches with subtlety but without judgement. It's great to see a film that moves fast and keeps you on the edge of your seat but, at the same time, manages to truly engage with its characters and give them time to develop before your eyes. Brilliant.

Having been fortunate enough to experience this event as member of the crew I can say Ivo Marloh has really captured the spirit of this gruelling race and the stories of the riders, all from the unique perspective of a rider! If you are a rider, adventurer, explorer, sportsperson or traveller make sure you see it!

So basically, it's all about a bunch of (mostly) white westerners that come to Mongolia to have fun riding horses. To feel better about themselves, they pretend to be participating in some sort of Mongolian ancient horse race. What they do instead is organising their own Mongolian-free event, just in case they'd catch some disease from the locals. The native Mongolians are only given a tertiary role in this film, if only to give it an exotic flavour and to entertain us with a few traditional, feel-good images.I left the cinema after realising I didn't give a crap about supremacist Westerners riding pointlessly around the steppe. I'd have rather seen the Mongolians race themselves and be interviewed about what they think about foreigners coming to mess with their affairs. This way I might have learnt something about their culture, which is no doubt far more interesting than the pretentious feelings of some spoilt adults acting as colonisers.