March 2026 on iwonder – highlights include Angry Spirits, Dil Leyla and One Ticket Please.
Some people organise their lives around a single driving force: a political mission, a spiritual calling, or a love of theatre so extreme it borders on something else entirely. It doesn’t always look rational from the outside, but it makes for compelling documentary subjects.
This month, with International Women’s Day on 8 March, we’re spotlighting three films that follow women on exactly those kinds of journeys, across three very different worlds.
Angry Spirits
Mongolia is the most mining-dependent country in Asia. One woman’s journey home shows you what that actually costs.
“A peculiar, rigorous film that creates a narrative and visual universe unlike anything else”
– Festival dei Popoli
Mining accounts for 93% of Mongolia’s exports. The Gobi Desert, one of the most sacred landscapes in Central Asian culture, is being carved open for copper, gold and coal. The people who grew up there, herders whose families lived nomadically for generations, have been driven into poverty and into the sprawling, heavily polluted capital Ulaanbaatar.
Ainur is one of them. She works as a dancer in a strip club, raises a daughter, and feels increasingly haunted by forces she can’t name. On the advice of shamans, she returns to the Gobi to seek healing and finds the land her ancestors revered being stripped apart. In Ainur’s world, the angry spirits and the mining trucks are connected. This film makes you feel why.
Director Iris Pakulla isn’t a filmmaker who parachuted into an exotic setting. She completed her PhD at Cambridge researching the impact of extractive industries on Mongolian communities and spent a decade living there. The access and trust she earned shows in every scene.
Why watch:
- Climate change has already raised Mongolia’s temperature by 2.5°C in 80 years, killed millions of livestock and pushed entire communities off their land, yet it gets almost no coverage. This film is the best entry point into that story
- Winner, Excellence in Visual Anthropology, Ethnocineca 2025.
Launching 12 March
Dil Leyla
She returned from Germany to rebuild her Kurdish hometown, and was elected mayor at 26. Then the Turkish army surrounded it.
“A chronicle of youthful hope contending with more powerful forces”
– IDFA
In 2014, Leyla Imret won 81% of the vote to become Turkey’s youngest ever elected mayor of Cizre, a Kurdish city on the Syrian and Iraqi border where she was born. She had been sent to Germany aged five after her father was killed by the Turkish military. She returned with a mandate to build parks, restore schools, and give the city’s children the childhood she never had.
Then Turkey’s parliamentary elections changed everything. The ceasefire broke down. The military surrounded Cizre. Over 150 civilians were killed, many reportedly burned alive in basements. Leyla was forcibly removed from office on terrorism charges. The UN was denied access to investigate. Director Asli Özarslan filmed through all of it, until the siege cut her off from Leyla entirely, not knowing if she was still alive.
Why watch:
- The Kurdish conflict has been called one of the most underreported political crises in Europe. Over 36,000 people have been killed in Turkey since 1984. This film, shot from inside the story, not from a distance, is one of the only documentaries that shows you what that conflict looks like from the ground
- Premiered at IDFA Amsterdam; won the Human Rights Award (FIDADOC) and Prix du Documentaire (Films Femmes Méditerranée).
Launching 26 March
One Ticket Please
She sees 500 plays a year, went to Harvard and Oxford, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, and is arguably the most divisive person in New York theatre. Meet Nicki Cochrane.
“I see more than the critics combined”
– Nicki Cochrane, American Theatre
Every morning, Nicki (78, Indian-born) takes the subway from Jamaica, Queens to Manhattan. Every evening she attends a performance. Broadway, off-Broadway, a basement showcase in Brooklyn: she doesn’t discriminate. She budgets $10,000 a year for theatre, though she rarely pays. When she doesn’t have a ticket she stands outside with a handwritten sign. Box office staff have dressed as her for Halloween. She has been parodied on a Broadway web series. She is, depending on who you ask, an inspiration or a menace.
Latvian director Matiss Kaza met Cochrane at his very first New York theatre performance. She sat down next to him. Two years later he had a film. What starts as a portrait of an eccentric becomes a question with no clean answer: Nicki’s children grew up without much while she went to the theatre every night. Was that selfish or admirable? You’ll have a strong opinion by the end.
Why watch:
- One of those documentaries that’s genuinely difficult to stop watching.
- Premiered at Göteborg Film Festival; won Best Documentary at the Winter Film Awards; IMDb 7.6
Two of these films will unsettle you. The third will make you smile, and then make you think. All three are worth your time.
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March 2026 on iwonder
