The Gobi Desert, a vast, rocky, and sandy territory upon which the borders of China and Mongolia rest, often sees freezing temperatures and sometimes even snow. You’re right, this is a rare but not impossible phenomenon. On a less surprising side, this land is also a geological buffet for precious mineral goods. Copper, gold, phosphorus, and coal are found and sourced here in abounding volumes. The scale of the operation is towering and vexing, and the toll is paid in human grit. Colors of White Rock, named after the Tsagaan Suvarga (an open pit for depositing copper and molybdenum), warns of this facet. 

Heavy-duty truck driver Maikhuu spends months on the dusty and perilous roads of the Gobi, some of which are in stasis due to—believe it or not—traffic. Maikhuu has three children, who are growing up with the help of her younger sister in a home that is distant like a dream. Conversely, her dreams are of breaking free. Hope is a foreign country for Maikhuu, and her American reverie has frayed over the years, leaving it just a single, somber, and disenchanting phone call away.

Filming over a handful of years, director Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig had previously tested the story in a short format, which received critical success (Lady of the Gobi, produced by The Guardian in 2022 and now streaming freely on The Guardian Documentaries). Expanding the story to an 83-minute runtime, he attempts a wider picture of this story. Over the years, Maikhuu maintains her defiance, while she is also molded to fit the competition and risks embedded in the lives of the thousands of drivers. The Mongolia-China border is polluted by coal dust, social endangerment, and industrial greed. The informal practices are met with resistance from the drivers’ union, whose leader burns through cigarettes and tears during his screentime but is a far cry from dismantling the systemic chauvinism (albeit subtly indicated) that has kept Maikhuu locked in her truck. 

Maikhuu is the one speaking to us, as if she were reading her story. Many of the most stimulating events, however, are left to be picked from her phone calls with her family or simply assumed. Maikhuu reminded me of that unreliable narrator, benevolent at core but questionable along the way. An interesting reflection on the complexion of the documentary as a whole. The images, occasionally, lift the story to meet the arid, lifeless surroundings of such a ‘home,’ and match the single mother’s hazy dream with the mirages of the Gobi. The sound, often thrumming and thundering, did so just the same. Being, nevertheless, ceaseless, it gives the film a relentless, long-haul momentum, much like a trailer. Despite the nod to social and feminist sensitivities in the filmmaking proximity (the title Daughter of Genghis from 2024 comes instantly to mind), which are somewhat rendered in the opening text of the film and anticipated by the extensive list of supporters, here we get a fast wiping of the correlation between a mining field and a battlefield, and a blinking at the implications on work and social life instead of prying under the hood. Lacking silences and empty moments, sequences that could at least indicate what life for a woman in this society might feel like, Choijoovanchig delivered a sensational resolution, a picture that suggests more than it illustrates. 

However flat this might sound, Colors of White Rock is an earnest channel to its protagonist, and it does linger like a warning. Did it need this full version? I am not convinced, but if this is what it takes to enter and communicate through the highest tier of the festival circuit and potentially the theaters, well, why not?

Colors of White Rock premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2026, in the Documentary Competition Section.

Colors of White Rock, 83’ / Director: Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig / Original Score: Gael Rakotondrabe / Editor: Simon Le Berre / Producers: Petite Maison Production, Tessa Louise Salomé & Luc Sorrel / Co-Producer: Icity Films, Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig / France, Mongolia

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