Naadam is Mongolia’s national festival, and for a visiting crew it is one of the highest-value, highest-pressure shoots in the country. Three days of wrestling, archery, and horse racing draw huge crowds, tight security, and a compressed shooting window, all built around a national holiday that will not move to suit a production schedule.
Covering it well means treating it as a live event shoot, not a travel sequence. Access, accreditation, vantage points, and crew logistics have to be arranged well ahead of the dates, and the plan needs a backup for the parts of the festival that happen outside the capital.
What Naadam Actually Involves
Naadam is held nationwide from July 11 to 13 each year, marking Mongolia’s National Day. The centerpiece is the “three manly games”: wrestling, archery, and horse racing, staged in their most prominent form at the National Sports Stadium and surrounding grounds in Ulaanbaatar, with parallel local Naadams held in every province and district across the country on the same dates.
Wrestling (Bökh)
Mongolian wrestling is single-elimination, with hundreds of wrestlers competing in an open field format rather than a roped ring. Matches happen simultaneously across the pitch, which is good for coverage variety but means a single static camera position will miss most of the action. A shoot plan needs floaters who can move between bouts, not just a locked wide shot.
Archery
Archery competitions include both men’s and women’s divisions, shot at targets set out on the ground rather than upright, with a distinct scoring chant from judges after each round. It is a quieter, more contained event visually than wrestling or racing, and usually easier to get a clean, unobstructed camera position for.
Horse Racing
The horse races are run on open steppe outside the city, over long distances, with child jockeys as young as five to twelve years old. This is the event that most requires advance planning: start and finish points can be far apart, dust and crowd movement affect visibility, and safe vehicle positioning near a moving field of horses needs to be worked out with local organizers in advance, not improvised on the day.
Filming Access: National Stadium vs. Countryside Naadams
The opening ceremony and main wrestling and archery events at the National Sports Stadium in Ulaanbaatar are the most heavily attended and most heavily controlled part of the festival. Camera positions inside the stadium are limited, ticketed, and often reserved well in advance for broadcasters with existing accreditation.
Provincial and district Naadams, held in the same three days across the countryside, are far less formal and often easier to get close access to, though they come with their own tradeoffs: fewer facilities, no guaranteed press infrastructure, and local organizers who need to be approached directly rather than through a national accreditation process. For crews after a more intimate, less crowded record of the festival, a countryside Naadam is frequently the better creative choice, not just the fallback option.
Permits and Media Accreditation
Filming Naadam as press or for a commercial production requires filming permits arranged ahead of the festival, and stadium-level access for the Ulaanbaatar events specifically needs media accreditation that should be requested well before July, since the window between confirmation and the festival itself is short and demand from international broadcasters is high every year. Crews on a journalist visa should also confirm that their visa documentation covers event-based filming, not just general access.
Practical Logistics for a Naadam Shoot
July in Ulaanbaatar is hot, crowded, and, around the festival, fully booked. Hotel rooms and vehicles should be secured months ahead, not weeks. Crowd density around the stadium and along race routes limits vehicle movement on the day itself, so a realistic shot list accounts for walking distances and fixed call times rather than assuming a crew can drive between setups.
A local unit that already knows the stadium layout, the timing of each event, and the informal rules around where cameras can and cannot go saves a significant amount of the shooting day. This is one of the few Mongolia shoots where local crew with prior Naadam experience is worth prioritizing over a purely imported team, simply because the event moves fast and does not pause for a crew to find its position.
Beyond Ulaanbaatar: Building a Naadam Sequence Into a Larger Shoot
Naadam often works best as one strong sequence inside a broader Mongolia production rather than the sole reason for a trip, since the festival itself only runs three days. Documentary and commercial productions frequently combine Naadam coverage with steppe, Gobi, or countryside filming days either side of it, which also gives a fallback if stadium access on the day itself turns out to be more restricted than planned.
Naadam rewards a crew that treats it like the live event it is: fixed dates, real security, and a small window to get the shot. Lock in accreditation and vehicle plans early, and build in a countryside option, and it becomes one of the most distinctive sequences a Mongolia shoot can deliver.
New to production in Mongolia? Start with our complete guide to filming in Mongolia, or see how a film fixer in Mongolia can handle permits, crews, equipment and logistics for your shoot.