Cinema on the steppes of Central Asia: Mongolian film culture from communism to commercialization

In Mongolia cinema has been a medium of artistic expression and documentation for more then seventy years and a popular leisure activity for the Mongolians for even longer. This article frames the investigation of Mongolian Cinema within the field of small nation cinema studies and subsequently traces the historical development of a national based film culture in Mongolia from its implementation in the 1930s under communist rule to its present state. The article explores the question of what happened to the national based film culture in the wreck of the Soviet meltdown around 1990 and how the socio-political transformation of the country since the early 1990s has challenged the existence of a locally rooted film culture in Mongolia.