The life and legend of Genghis Khan: Based on leading scholarly accounts, MONGOL delves into the dramatic and harrowing early years of the ruler who was born as Temudgin in 1162. As it follows Temudgin from his perilous childhood to the battle that sealed his destiny, the film paints a multidimensional portrait of the future conqueror, revealing him not as the evil brute of hoary stereotype, but as an inspiring, fearless and visionary leader. MONGOL shows us the making of an extraordinary man, and the foundation on which so much of his greatness rested: his relationship with his wife, Borte, his lifelong love and most trusted advisor.
Filmed in the very lands that gave birth to Genghis Khan, MONGOL transports us back to a distant and exotic period in world history; to a nomad's landscape of endless space, climatic extremes and ever-present danger. In a performance of powerful stillness and subtlety, celebrated young Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu captures the inner fire that enabled a hunted boy to become a legendary conqueror. Asano's achievement is matched by those of his co-stars, including the newcomer Khulan Chuluun as Temudgin's wife Borte, and the Chinese actor Honglei Sun as the Mongol chieftain Jamukha, Temudgin's dearest friend and deadliest enemy.

In the 1990s, Sergei Bodrov picked up "The Legend of the Black Arrow," a book about the Mongols and the Turks by the eminent Russian historian Lev Gumilev. By 2000, Bodrov had added a movie about Genghis Khan to his wish-list of projects. "I'm always interested to take a famous character and dig a little; to take a cliché and find what happened in real life. I want to know: if this is such an awful man, who is accused of killing millions - how did it happen? How did he become Genghis Khan?," he explains. "His childhood is really an unknown story. Then you learn that he was an orphan, he was a slave, everybody tried to kill him, his wife was kidnapped, he got her back when she was pregnant. For me, immediately, it's the beginning of a very compelling story about an extraordinary character."
Bodrov spent several years researching his subject, reading everything he could find about Genghis Khan. The only Mongol history from the era is "The Secret History of Mongols," a lengthy poem written by an unknown author sometime alter Genghis Khan's death in 1227. For centuries "The Secret History of the Mongols" was considered lost; a copy, believed to date to the 14th Century, was finally discovered in China in the 19th Century.