Another prestigious stop was Hollywood, where it was Mongolia’s entry at this year’s Oscars.
The film has also been shown at festivals in Osaka (where it took best film honours at the Asian Film Festival in March), Busan, Marrakech, Toronto and elsewhere, making it a powerful calling card for an emerging director and her streaming dreams.
Purev-Ochir, 35, with a master’s in screenwriting, was also the writer of an awards-laden string of short films that preceded her debut feature. And it is back to the shorter form now, following her participation in the recent International Film Camp at Sands China, Macau, run by the Asian Film Awards Academy (AFAA).
Purev-Ochir was one of eight filmmakers each awarded HK$300,000 (US$38,400) to make the movies they pitched to the academy.
“The film is called A South Facing Window,” she says, during a video call from her home in Portugal. “Shooting starts in July and we’re now in pre-production, casting and putting the crew together.”
The AFAA will continue to help develop the film, which, like previous projects (streaming on Vimeo), is drawing Purev-Ochir back to her hometown.
“It’s about a couple in their twenties, with a young daughter, on the verge of breaking up. They are trying to fix their relationship by looking for an apartment to buy,” she says. “They go from one empty place to another, trying to figure out if they’re going to be happy.
“In between, they’re stuck in traffic – a huge element of modern life in Ulaanbaatar, being stuck there for hours and fighting because the city is way beyond its capacity.
“The film asks whether they have a future, but also questions the future of Mongolia, as well as the mood and general atmosphere of my generation.”
Another take on the country’s prospects underpins City of Wind. It features “a 17-year-old shaman and high-school student living in the capital. He has access to an ancestral spirit,” says Purev-Ochir.
“It’s a love story and a teenage coming-of-age story, but also a modern tale of Mongolia. It’s my way of documenting a specific time in a specific place: Ulaanbaatar, which is quite unknown to the rest of the world.”
Purev-Ochir’s formative years clearly informed her eventual career choice.
“From an early age I was living through film,” she recalls. “I didn’t know it was something I could actually do, but a big part of my childhood was me understanding the world through cinema.
“I was the oldest child and was alone a lot with my sisters when Mongolia went through harsh economic times in the 1990s. I feel mine is the neglected generation.”
Such were the effects of the (albeit peaceful) Mongolian revolution. “There was such a shift in lifestyle,” says Purev-Ochir.
“Our parents were trying to figure everything out in this transition while we were silently growing up alongside the uprooting of the economic model, destruction of the social and political structure, mass unemployment, education and healthcare in a shambles and so on. There was a lot of fear for the future.
“And we grew up watching all kinds of new content that was coming into the country: Chinese soap operas, Brazilian series, Bollywood soaps.”
Purev-Ochir’s mother is a cardiologist and expectations were that another doctor would eventually grace the family. But when she headed west, to Izmir, in Turkey, a different idea took hold.
“I studied in Turkey, which has a big scholarship programme for central Asian countries,” she says.
“I got into film because I was away for the first time; you learn the language and it is like a gap year, you can discover yourself. I started to think I could study film – before that it was never something I could verbalise. But I think my parents thought it was just a passing thing.”
Purev-Ochir now lives in Caldas da Rainha, having moved from Lisbon during the pandemic, but her work and homeland remain mutually embedded.
“I’m isolated from my country and although it is beautiful, this is a small city,” she says. “Going home to shoot films is always a joyous time. I like to be on set and it is an opportunity to be among lots of people. It’s an intense period; always like a celebration.”
Although Purev-Ochir feels that writing about anywhere other than Mongolia might be impossible, and says she has no current plans to create a multi-season streaming series, she does perhaps have a certain secret ambition.
“I heard HBO is making a Harry Potter series,” she says. “My sisters and I were huge Potterheads as children. If they make all seven books […] one of my long-term goals would be to direct an episode!”