The Gobi Desert is home to Mongolia’s largest coal basins, which are critical to the country’s industrialisation. Impossibly long and desolate stretches of road connect coal mines in the Gobi to China, and thousands of truckers travel along Mongolia’s coal highway ferrying precious carbon loads. One of these truckers is a woman named S.Maikhuu Sengee, otherwise known as the “Lady of the Gobi.”

The documentary, titled The Lady of the Gobi after S.Maikhuu herself, details how Mongolia has undergone massive migrations as it went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. The country’s resources, including coal, have been exported to its southern neighbour China for decades.

But S.Maikhuu stayed; the trucker lived out of her cab for days and weeks at a time, between stretches of living in quarantine camps as she made her way to and from the border of Mongolia and China. She’d been a hairdresser before becoming a driver, and the documentary follows S.Maikhuu even as she helps fellow truckers out with a haircut now and then.