Born in Ulaanbaatar, Byambaa Sakhiya is a well-known Mongolian film director. His passion for literature and cinema led B. Sakhiya joined the film industry, initially as an assistant to Mongol Kino, the country’s largest film production studio. During the Soviet period, film production was a very stable system as art was at the service of Russian propaganda. For this very reason, however, artists did not have creative freedom. After the democratic revolution in the early 1990s, support for the film system began to collapse but, at the same time, a freer creative drive from the authors began to emerge. Byambaa also talks about his films “Passion” and “Remote Control” and how they portray Mongolian culture, the transition from a Soviet regime to openness to democracy, the importance of national folklore and legends in the country’s mentality.
The video was edited using excerpts from the following films: Passion (2011) and “Remote Control” (2013) by Byambaa Sakhiya.