Khadak

A seizure-prone young shepherd (Khayankhyarvaa) and his family are forced by the government to abandon their traditional nomadic lifestyle for a modern, workaday existence in this experimental feature from Mongolia. Largely forsaking Western-style linearity for a more visionary mode, Khadak doesn’t so much depict the trauma of displacement as embody it, channeling its political rage into stark, frontal compositions and jarring formal breaks, including a dissonant music-video number. Ultimately less concerned with individuals than with the land itself, the film captures the icy vastness of the Mongolian steppes with a surreal grandeur that occasionally recalls Werner Herzog.