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.
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.
