The story of Maikhuu, one of the rare women truck drivers fighting for survival in hazardous coal roads.

Colors of White Rock foregrounds the story of Maikhuu, one of the rare women performing this perilous act. With the money she’s made by driving, she was able to afford a better-equipped apartment in the capital city Ulaanbaatar and send her kids to good schools. Yet, more and more, as she suffers the strain on her health and the long periods of family separation, she’s beginning to doubt the job’s sacrifices. At the same time, she’s expressed that driving “is all she knows now”—the “most important skill.” The mining industry’s underbelly of human rights violations that grows in proportion to its wealth, women drivers’ feminist fight to stay afloat as they take on added barriers and dangers in this hypermasculine society of workers, and the fatal and inextricable link between the highway’s ecological disaster and its human impact.

I grew up in a period of great change in Mongolia. As the country transitioned from a socialist to a free-market economy in the 1990s, there was mass migration from rural to the capital. As a filmmaker, this has always been an interest of mine: exploring not just the enormous changes taking place in my country, but also their human costs. I was filming a video in the Gobi Desert when I saw this enormous line of trucks waiting to cross the Chinese border. I saw the faces of some drivers, looking tired and gloomy. These images stuck with me and gave way to the idea of a documentary. I it can spread awareness of what’s happening on a global scale with the mining industry’s rise.