TIFF Interview: Gabrielle Brady of “The Wolves Always Come at Night”

Documentarian Gabrielle Brady (Island of the Hungry Ghosts) has a new film out, The Wolves Always Come at Night, which just premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival—aka TIFF—where I reviewed it. The movie is made using hybrid fiction/non-fiction techniques, with the primary subjects, Davaasuren Dagvasuren (Davaa) and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg (Zaya), working with Brady to craft a narrative that explores the plight of displaced herders in Mongolia. With the increasing ravages wrought by climate change, traditional ways of life are under constant threat. And so we follow Davaa, Zaya, and their four children from the Gobi Desert to the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, where they make an uneasy new home. I had the chance to sit down with Brady via Zoom during the festival, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: Can you please explain your own history in Mongolia prior to making this film?

Gabrielle Brady: It goes back a little bit. I was first there in 2007, so over 15 years ago. I was really young. I was just out of university and this opportunity came up to move to Mongolia and co-host and co-produce this kids show called Voice Box teaching English through Mongolian culture. It was a very cheesy TV show, but it took me and the co-host all over Mongolia and we would stay with herders on our travels. And I ended up there for two years. It made a huge impression and in the years afterwards, I started returning again and spending more time. I would visit some of the herding families that I’d been living with and would find that they weren’t living out in the countryside anymore. They’d already migrated to the city. So these were the first seeds, or the first sparks, of a connection to the possibility of making a film.

CLR: What initially attracted you to Mongolia in the first place?

GB: I was 20 years old. It was the first time I’d ever been out of Australia. It was an opportunity to go somewhere that I had only very distant ideas of what it was like. I was so young and I was so impressionable. I think in a way I was drawn to visit a place that was so unlike, or what I thought was so unlike, anything I had known or grown up with. That was my younger self. And then of course over the years I forged really deep collaborations and relationships with people there. But I think that first instinct was to spend time in a place that felt like a very different way of seeing the world that would therefore help me to understand my own sense of identity in the world. It was a fast track to kind of deconstruct the way I’d grown up.

CLR: Beyond what you just told me about your many returns to the country over the years, what made you start this new film in 2022?

GB: Even as I was making Island of the Hungry Ghosts, I was visiting Mongolia and starting to have conversations and do research trips. The first serious research trip I took, I was six months pregnant, going out to the Gobi Desert. And I think it was around this time that the seed for a film really started to become more serious. At that time, I had been speaking to Ariunaa [Tserenpil], a dear friend of mine who’s kind of the heart and soul of cinema in Mongolia. She’s one of our producers. And in our conversations there was kind of an invitation where Ariunaa was mentioning this phenomenon that we’re inside of at the moment, the clearing out of the countryside, where the most ancient history in the world, and certainly Mongolia, is being completely warped and turned on its side. There’s a kind of normalcy to that when you are inside of an immense change. So the invitation was as someone who’s not so close and who’s not from that community to work with a Mongolian crew. So we kind of had both an inside perspective and outside perspective. And I think in that conversation, a penny dropped for me.

CLR: So then how did you go from that to meeting your two protagonists, Davaa and Zaya?

GB: My films are built on a lot of long extensive research and relationship building. I worked with a researcher named Dorjpagma [Dugar]. She’s a journalist and she spent every weekend going out to the ger districts, which are the districts outside the city, spending time with the social workers, with herders who had just moved, forging those relationships and putting together a kind of casting document where I would come in and we would go and meet people and see where our mutual connections were. We were looking for someone who wanted us as much as we wanted them, right? Because it’s a two-way street; you kind of have to want them to be part of the film and they have to want to be part of it for their own reason, as well. And somebody who could kind of carry an immense cinematic emotional story. It’s a big ask. So this was a really lengthy process, over two years of research to build that trust, build those networks and relationships. And eventually, we met Davaa and Zaya.

CLR: So, if I understand correctly from your press notes, the first part of what you filmed is what comes second in the documentary, which is them moving to the ger district outside the city. And then, subsequent to that, you filmed the first part of the movie, which is their prior life, which you had to stage. So that’s what makes this a hybrid between documentary and fiction. So how did you pitch this idea to them?

GB: They pitched it to us! (laughs) I think that the hybrid space gives so many more possibilities, both in terms of the visual language—your cinematic approach—but also in how you can work with the participants. Davaa and Zaya are co-writers on this film. When we first started talking, it was very quick. They were like, “OK, I get it. I get what you’re doing. I’m in, we’re moving tomorrow. You can come and film and then let’s keep talking.” So literally the next day we picked up the DP [Director of Photography] from the airport, drove immediately to the outskirts of the city where they were driving in with their entire possessions on the back of a truck and setting up their ger. That’s all incredibly observational. So that whole first shoot was really documentary footage. It was these first very raw and nuanced moments of being alien to this place that was so unfamiliar to them.

And from that came more conversations, which was the basis of our co-scripting relationship, to see how we could forge a bigger story around that. And Davaa made it really clear to me that if we were going to make this story, we needed to come back and show people how life was: “I need people to see what we’ve left behind and what we’ve lost because until they have that piece, they won’t know the full picture of who we are.” So that, to me, was an invitation to think about how we could create this story filming in retrospect, because early on we knew that we weren’t going to be out in the countryside waiting for this really traumatic event to happen to a family, to run there and be right in the middle of it. I think that way of filmmaking is so extractive and causes a lot of problems. So for us, this way of filming in retrospect meant we could both be part of creating the story.

CLR: Even though they pitched this idea to you of going back, do you think it was hard for them, or healing for them, to go back to the Gobi and revisit their lives as herders?

GB: I’ll just answer from my perspective, of course, because Davaa and Zaya would have their own words about their own experience. They’ve still got family there, so it’s a very natural thing for them. They would anyways be going back and helping at different seasonal times. But I think what I noticed was that certain elements affected them differently, and I’ll give an example. When they originally left, Davaa had not talked to his uncle, and it was a big regret that he had shared with me that in a way they never got to have those words of farewell. So in our conversations, it was like, “Well, what would it be like if we created a space where you could have a talk with your uncle about what it means to leave?”

So we created that environment, set up the filming, and they had this conversation that was incredibly touching for both of them. And so for us, in the filming, we created a space where it could become a spoken thing. And I think that happened on a lot of occasions. So in that way, not to speak for them, but I think it was incredibly healing because it created more agency for them to, in a way, put that moment on hold and be able to have these conversations that went unsaid or step back into it in a way with a bit of distance. I think it was a really strong and profound experience for them.

CLR: It sounds like it, and I’m glad to hear that the idea of retraumatizing them was something you didn’t want to do. But of course that’s the advantage of collaborating with people: you have a chance to talk this through. So you mentioned how that initial shoot as they enter the ger district of the city was not staged; it’s actual footage. That shot of their ger on the back of the truck almost tipping over is quite a dramatic one.

GB: It is all real footage and on the very first day of our entire shoot, so we were still chasing our tails, were still getting a sense of the dynamics. This was how this family arrived to the city. These were their first moments. Wow.

CLR: It’s so impressive to me that you can carry your house basically on the back of a truck and then by the end of the first day they’ve more or less assembled it, which they have to because they have no place to sleep otherwise. Speaking of unstaged vs. staged footage, I did have a question about all those dead animals in the desert after the sandstorm. Were they just drugged for the shot or were those actually dead animals in that moment that Davaa had to pick up and put in the back of the truck?

GB: No, there was no drugging, no animal was drugged or harmed during the shoot, no. I think this really is the kind of pinnacle fictional moment in the whole film, the most constructed moment that we have. And at the same time, we’d had conversations of, “Do we need to show that moment? Can we allude to it? Can we refer to it?” But in this idea of naming the loss, seeing the loss, we knew we needed to see it. We needed to not hide behind that moment. A lot of this was very improvised when we were out there, through workshopping with Davaa. “How can we do this? How can we do it in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s hard on you? How can we logistically do it?”

So this was spring, and in the spring there’s a lot of animal loss. There’d been an animal loss at a property nearby. So we were able to go over there and work with those animals and create a bit of a moment and a scene around it with Davaa, but in conversation with him. When I think about how the scene was made, it was quite playful. Davaa was there, he was telling us about how they were positioned, remembering about how they were found, but it was kind of conversational. And I think for me, as a director, I wanted to make sure that this scene didn’t rely on heavy emotion. I wanted, with the visual language, for us to capture an atmosphere of how that was without him having to step back into the memory of it. And this is how we did it. And then the emotion of that situation could be felt in other scenes that were a little bit more contained, and let’s say safe, for him to explore that.

CLR: So, I’m not a farm kid at all. And we see two difficult goat births in this film. How common is that? That goats, at least in this area, require human assistance to give birth to their kids? Because we see two of them and it looks like the goat would’ve been in a bad way had Davaa not come to help.

GB: This was such a revelation to me, as well, but also the way that animals are attended to and cared for, not just in Mongolia, not just in the Gobi, but by Davaa. It’s so peculiar, so special, so singular; I really saw him as this midwife. So spring is a season of threat. Anything can happen. And of course it’s becoming a heavier threat each year. So in a way, this kind of midwife role is something that people play and kind of have to play to make sure that enough animals survive. So this is something that is happening,  this very kind of tenderly caring for these animals like a midwife, almost like human birth. I think it’s a very Davaa thing, and that’s what makes him so special.

CLR: Speaking of his relationship to animals, how did you come up with the idea for the horse that we see that appears out of nowhere—maybe it’s a fantasy or dream or maybe it’s real—that we see in the city towards the end of the film?

GB: Yeah, this whole thread of the film was born out of these very early conversations with Davaa. When he’d first moved to the city, he was carrying a very haunting sensation with him. He was somebody who felt a bit shellshocked. I experienced him as someone who was physically there, but not mentally arrived at all. And he was sharing at that time how he was experiencing these strange hallucinatory visions of his horse, his stallion, whom he had had to sell in order to be able to come to the city. It was like a regret that was lingering everywhere in his body. And at the same time it symbolized the much bigger regret of “What have we done? We’ve given up everything we know and in a way we can’t reverse that decision.” So I think this guilt, this regret, this doubt, this insecurity, this kind of alien feeling was being manifested in this connection to his horse, which was so deep and unlike anything I’ve experienced.

So, I really had to stretch my understanding of the world, like, “Wow, you can be so close to an animal that it’s a family member and you’ve lost them.” And so this was, for me, this revelation moment of his haunting. It was an image now of something we could work with in the cinematic landscape of the film. He is being haunted by this presence. This is his consciousness talking to him, and it’s kind of taking the form in these apparitions. And I thought that was a really beautiful way to create this story.

CLR: I want to thank you so much for talking to me.

GB: Thank you so much!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.