Daughter of Genghis (2024) ‘Hot Docs’ Review: Sensitively Expanding Snapshot of A Nationalist and Mother

When does a love for one’s own land turn corrosive and isolating? Can it be so blinding that one is totally swept by a tide of bitterness that turns more damaging to oneself than having any constructive appeal? What does this venomousness, this intense resentment, affect on a psychological level and in other relationships that one holds dear? What past pain does it attempt to hide and leave unacknowledged in its pursuit of vengeful, hateful goals? Such questions shoot through Kristoffer Juel Poulson, Knub Brix and Christian Als’ stark, emotionally effective documentary Daughter of Genghis.

At the center is Gerel Byamba, a leader of an ultra-national Mongolian group of women. She is driven by a furious opposition to the influence of foreign imperialism in overriding the essential make-up of her country. Most of the Mongolian resources get siphoned off to China. A majority of its industries are owned and controlled by the latter as well. The country’s fabric is in danger of being wholly altered to suit external dictates. How can Mongolia then continue to retain a sense of unsullied identity? This propels Byamba’s indignation, who mounts undercover operations with her ragtag group to do what she feels is her utmost duty.

She regards it as her responsibility to protect Mongol genes. So, she is extremely incensed at Mongolian female sex workers mixing with Chinese clients and potentially risking the country’s future of racial purity. The pure rage and disgust in her voice, when she asserts her task as making such women ‘selling’ themselves to the Chinese feel shame and disgrace in their work, is bristling.

The film hurls us directly into these operations done at night, as she and her group, all masked up, storm into saunas, often doubling as brothels since sex work is illegal in the country, rail and rant at the women, their blunt interrogation serving its harshest denunciations. When the film opens, Byamba is mighty convinced of her tactics. She is enraged at the Nazi appropriation of the swastika, a symbol which she upholds as an emblem of Mongol power. She is constantly pushing for ownership of Mongol identity and roots, staving off foreign impositions.

A still from Daughter of Genghis (2024). — A still from “Daughter of Genghis” (2024).

Anger and grief fuel her, whose depths unravel gradually. She’s hurting but keeps it out of view of her six-year-old son, Temuulen. Nor does she confide in him anything about her undercover activities. She wouldn’t open up to him whenever he asks about his absent father. Byamba has got wedged in her many aches, all of which she keeps sheltered from her son. She had lost her mother at six and eventually her husband to a mining accident. She never got close to her father. Their relationship has been encased in emotional distance.

Across the seven-year span of the film, we witness Byamba come to terms with the price of her hardline activism. While she had earlier been unrelenting in her ideological single-mindedness, she learns to weigh and assess how emotionally, physically sustainable, and healthy her lone-wolf methods are. Tracing Byamba’s inner journey without casting judgment and reflecting on her making her way out of aggression towards a smidgen of healing is what “Daughter of Genghis” accomplishes with heart-tugging compassion. Earlier, she deflects her friends’ kind worries over the immense peril lodged in the undercover acts.

While she insists she is doing it for her country, she grows to recognize its consequences on a personal level. How does it impinge on her responsibilities towards her son? Could he feel abandoned? Slowly, she concedes to grappling with the implications and magnitude of these questions. The most moving scenes pivot on the relationship between the mother and son. As he grows over the course of the film, so does she, too, almost spiritually, filtering out all the hatred and funneling its extruding, negative energy into enabling him to share some of her burdens and walk toward something reconstructive. The reaffirmation of strength, renewal, and vitality with which Daughter of Genghis closes lends it a wonderful, magnanimous grace and peace of spirit.