‘Colors of White Rock’ Review: Vivid Documentary Portrait of a Trucker Traveling Mongolia’s Desert of Broken Dreams

Trucks provide much of the outright color in “Colors of White Rock.” Rolling metal rectangles in pillarbox red, royal blue and bottle green, they glaringly clash with the dun khaki expanses of the Gobi Desert as they roar down its lonesome highways — the surrounding sands so vast and empty as to make the vehicles look like matchbox cars in long shot. Their route is simple and linear, as they ferry loads of Mongolian coal past the Chinese border; there’s not much possibility of getting lost. But after several years on this beat, rare female trucker Maikhuu feels adrift anyway: Separated from her family back home and largely overlooked by her male peers on the road, hers is often a spartan, solitary life, through which Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig‘s impressive documentary observes a changing national culture.

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A standout premiere in Tribeca’s documentary competition that has since also played at Sheffield DocFest, Choijoovanchig’s concise but expansive feature has the balance of human intimacy and environmental curiosity can power a nonfiction crowdpleaser — and should see it travel much further on the festival circuit. As far as distribution goes, one hopes that “Colors of White Rock” sees some theatrical play, if only to do justice to its director-DP’s sparsely spectacular shooting of this harsh but beautiful landscape. In certain soaring drone shots, the Gobi’s dry, greige sprawl looks like nothing so much as the surface of another planet, at least until it’s disrupted by snaking manmade infrastructure and drab light industry.

Maikhuu recalls when it was even less developed. “As a child, there were only yurts here,” she says, looking out at the desert that encircles White Rock — the small coal-mining settlement and transit hub, ironically shrouded in dark mining dust, where she lives between driving stints. Her wistfulness is tinged with guilt. She knows she’s part of the system stripping the region of precious natural resources and taking them across the border; the land cannot sustain this livelihood forever.

But trucking pays, in ways other jobs have not. A single mother, Maikhuu previously worked as a hairdresser and cab driver in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, but couldn’t make enough to provide for herself and her children — who now live with her sister in the city. She dreams of living with her united family in a developed country where work is easier to come by, but stoically accepts her lot: “Everyone’s hopes are different, depending on their situation,” she sighs. At the wheel, she keeps her mind unsentimentally on the job, which is fraught with dangers for the inattentive: The roads are narrow, and accidents are common.

Confidently investing in her human subject as a representative of an evolving way of life for Mongolian women in particular, Choijoovanchig films her over a period of six years, darting between different phases — the COVID period, during which her work life is drastically altered, throws a clear wrench in film’s timeline, while trips home to visit her children bright contrasting light and joy to proceedings, showing a far softer side of Maikhuu. Otherwise, her tough, implacable demeanor is a professional necessity in a patriarchal sphere still hostile to female drivers, and in a culture where working women must still bear a lot of scrutiny, suspicion and stigma: Her young daughter is mortified by a rumor circulating at school that her mother is a sex worker.

Maikhuu’s frank, characterful voiceover narration gives the film a narrative consistency even as its structure zigs and zags, though not everything is shared: “Colors of White Rock” hints at an unless, less isolated off-road existence for its heroine, not least as it poignantly follows her through another pregnancy, the father unidentified. Against such seismic personal developments, the simultaneous grown and depletion of White Rock and its environs happen at a far more gradual pace, but don’t go ignored by Choijoovanchig and his patient camera. Swirling sands don’t pass through an hourglass in this film, but they mark time just the same.