Director: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
A teenage shaman tries to hold two lives together in City of Wind, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir's 2024 drama set against the pull of tradition and modern Mongolia.
What is City of Wind about?
Seventeen-year-old Ze carries a role most people twice his age would find overwhelming: he is a spiritual healer his community turns to for guidance, comfort, and ritual in moments of crisis. By day he is also just another high school student, chasing grades, friendships, and a first serious attachment in a city that has little patience for either spiritual duty or teenage uncertainty. Tergel Bold-Erdene plays Ze as someone quietly stretched between obligations he did not choose and a version of adolescence he is only beginning to claim for himself. As pressures from both sides intensify, the film follows Ze toward a reckoning with which parts of his life he can keep separate and which ones inevitably bleed into each other, set against the harder edges of a rapidly changing Ulaanbaatar.
Cast & crew
Tergel Bold-Erdene carries the film in the lead role, with Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba and Anu-Ujin Tsermaa rounding out a cast of largely unfamiliar faces whose grounded, understated performances suit the film's quiet, observational tone.
Context & significance
City of Wind is a co-production spanning France, Germany, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Qatar, directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir. It is one of relatively few internationally distributed dramas to center Mongolian shamanic tradition, using the coming-of-age framework to look at how spiritual inheritance survives, or struggles to survive, contact with a modernizing society. At 104 minutes, the film favors patient, observational scenes over dramatic shorthand, letting Ze's double life unfold gradually rather than rushing toward a tidy resolution.
Where & how to watch
City of Wind is available on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and Persian subtitles, part of a library curated for Persian-speaking viewers. Watching requires only a free K-Time account login; this page can be read without one.