MIDDLEBURY — Nineteen trips, three documentary films, and a book later, Sas Carey decided to do things a little differently for her fourth film about the nomadic reindeer herders of northern Mongolia who she’s been following since 1994.
“I’m doing everything weird,” she said at her Middlebury home during an interview last week. “I’m doing everything my own way.”
Doing things her own way is nothing new for Carey. And we’ll get to see just what she’s taking about during a pre-screening of her latest film, “Transition,” at the Town Hall Theater on Saturday, Dec. 7,  at 8 p.m. A reception will be held at the theater an hour beforehand.
One of the differences about this film is the style. “It’s vérité,” Carey explained, “where it looks like you’re a fly on the wall.”
Vérité, according to Wikipedia, “combines improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind crude reality.” 
This definition might be bookish if it weren’t so true to Carey’s intention with “Transition.”
One hundred years ago all Mongolians were nomadic herders. Today only one-third of them are. “Transition” explores that transformation through the lens of one person’s life.
“The film takes this huge story of all these nomadic herders becoming sedentary, and distills it through one woman’s experience as she navigates her life,” Carey said. 
The protagonist is 27-year-old Khongoroo, a medical doctor. She grapples with what it means to remain in the capital Ulaanbaatar — what is lost and what is gained. She misses the beautiful but remote East Taiga, where two-dozen families live in a tight-knit community. Ulaanbaatar, a city of 1.5 million, has opportunities the countryside does not. Khongoroo must also decide whether to risk the health of her three-year-old daughter in the polluted capital or to send her to her grandmother.
So much of the time Carey has spent in the northern Mongolian region has been dedicated to studying and immersing herself in the culture. Carey’s previous films, “Gobi Women’s Song,” (2006) “Ceremony” (2015) and “Migration” (2016), all in their own way explore this deep culture. 
“‘Transitions’ has a certain bookend feel,” said Carey when asked if she’s going to continue making documentaries about the Dukha (the preferred name for this small ethnic group of reindeer herders in Mongolia). “I’ve felt an urgency to get the stories while it’s happening… it’s been fascinating.”
Now Carey’s curiosity is keyed in on how audiences will react to her films. For the Dec. 7 pre-screening at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater, Carey wants to ask the viewers what they get out of the film. 
“I’m too close to it,” said Carey, who’s called Middlebury home for 40 years. “It will be good to hear my community’s perspectives.”
Carey is an expert listener — as a spiritual reader and healer, she gets a lot of practice tuning-in to the world (seen and unseen) around us. 
“When I first stepped on the ground in Mongolia back in 1994 I just knew I had a connection,” Carey said, remembering that moment as a 49-year-old. “It brought me back to when I was living in the Northeast Kingdom in the ’60s, doing the whole ‘back to the earth’ life… The nomads had been living this way for generations… It was so easy and not uncomfortable.”
Carey kept going back. Returning to northern Mongolia to study traditional Mongolian medicine, as a health educator with the United Nations Development Program, as a filmmaker and director, as a teacher and as a trusted friend.
“Isn’t there something about being connected to the earth?” she asked. “The mystery of not being in control — it’s part of the life — and the openness to that mystery.”
When she returned home to Vermont, Carey took off her traveling hat and queued into her roles here at home. Carey has served at the Weybridge elementary school as a second grade teacher, at the Parent Child Center as a program director and at a summer camp at Rutland Mental Health. She spent 11 years as a sculpture artist, a lifetime as the mother of two, earned her nursing degree from the University of Vermont in her 30s, worked as a medical-surgical nurse at Porter Hospital and discovered her calling as a a spiritual healer and teacher. Oh, and she founded and continues to run Nomadicare, Inc. in 2010 as non-profit with the 501(c)(3) fiscal agent Ecologia in order to “support and preserve traditional Mongolian nomadic culture through healthcare, films and stories.” Filmmaking and directing has been her most recent chapter.
Come see her new work, “Transition,” on Saturday, Dec. 7. Tickets are $22 and available at the door or townhalltheater.org. Carey will be at the pre-screening to connect with viewers before the film is released in early 2020.  
Editor’s Note: For more information about Nomadicare visit nomadicare.org.