“The Wolves Always Come at Night” is an evocative immersion in a dying way of life, that of nomadic Mongolian goat, horse and cattle herders. Gabrielle Brady’s documentary captures the stark beauty of the treeless brownscape of the Mongolian steppes, with climate change as the subtext the locals are struggling to live with.

There’s a reason this once temperate grassland is brown and more desolate than usual these days.

Brady’s film, Australia’s best hope for a Best International Feature (or Best Documentary) Oscar nomination, is a fly-on-the-wall intimate look at the changes coming to the lives of Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg. They’re a shepherding coupling raising four children among their horses and goats, living in their roomy, round ger (tent), doting on their kids and their animals but with desertification staring them and their way of life in the face.

They and their relatives have thrived on these steppes for millennia. “Davaas” teaches their son the work from the back of the motorbike he tends their goats with, noting which nannies are lying down, ready to give birth and which ones will need their help, just from the length of time the goat is down.

He treasures his short, sturdy Mongolian horses and happily adds to his herd a prized stallion from his uncle.

But the dust is noticable and omnipresent, and when the community gathers to discuss local issues, the years of drought dominate their worries. We know change is coming, and when a dust storm like “I’ve never seen before” bowls them over, forces them to release their horses from the corral to flee for any shelter they can find, a tragedy will uproot them, perhaps permanently.

They have to move to town, with Davaas taking a job driving a shovel at an open pit quarry. He laments the “untouched land” and good soil that his employer is violating with every shovel scoop. And at night, he confesses his failings to his wife.

“I’ve done nothing but waste the blessings of our animals,” he tells her (in Mongolian with English subtitles).

The poetic nature of some of the dialogue and the pillow-talk intimacy of the conversations and filming reminds one that documentaries now include screenwriting credits, and make one wonder just how much of what we’re seeing is staged, repeated for the camera or “scripted” for heightened effect. Documentaries often seem like docudramas these days.

But “The Wolves Always Come at Night” is a vivid document of a family and culture struggling to adjust to the harsh realities of climate change and just what that “change” means on a personal level to people who may not know the science, but they believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes and have experienced within their own living memory.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg

+Credits: Directed by Garbrielle Brady, scripted by Gabrielle Brady, Davaasuren Dagvasuren and
Otgonzaya DashzevegA BBC Storyville/Madman Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:35