Behemoth! Movie News: Latest Updates & Cast Revealed

New York, NY - July 28, 2026 - Tony Gilroy’s latest producing venture, the documentary “Behemoth!” starring Pedro Pascal as narrator, is set to world premiere at the New York Film Festival this fall. The announcement, made this morning by festival organizers, marks a major theatrical debut for a film that originally surfaced over a decade ago as a stark, largely unseen portrait of industrial devastation.

The 95-minute documentary, directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang and first released in 2015, depicts the environmental and human cost of heavy mining operations on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Pascal, best known for his roles in “The Mandalorian” and “The Last of Us,” will provide voiceover narration for this new presentation, which Gilroy - the Oscar-nominated writer-director of “Michael Clayton” and creator of the “Star Wars” series “Andor” - helped shepherd into wider release.

“Behemoth!” earned a 7.455 out of 10 on TMDb following its initial release, but never received a major U.S. festival slot until now. The NYFF screening is expected to be the first time most American audiences will encounter Zhao’s unflinching work. Gilroy and Pascal are both attached to the project as executive producers, with Pascal contributing his voice to the film’s English-language version.

A Grim Look at Mining’s Toll

The documentary offers a hypnotic, nearly wordless visual essay on the transformation of pristine grasslands into sprawling mine sites. Zhao’s camera captures the sunlit beauty of the steppe before the dust from iron and coal operations blankets the landscape. Herdsmen are shown leaving as their meadows shrink. Night scenes reveal iron mines lit up around the clock, with workers operating drilling machines in a fight “against the machine and against themselves,” according to the film’s official synopsis.

Coal miners, their faces obscured by dust masks, become ghostlike figures filling trucks that run an endless conveyor of ore to iron works. Inside those plants, Zhao’s camera finds another crowd of laborers “being baked in hell,” as the synopsis puts it. The hospital sequences are particularly harrowing: miners who have breathed coal dust for decades face death as an everyday reality. The film’s tagline - “They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise” - underscores its bleak, non-redemptive vision.

From 2015 to the Big Screen

Zhao Liang, a veteran Chinese artist and filmmaker known for his documentary work on social issues, originally released “Behemoth!” in 2015. The film played at a handful of international festivals, including the Venice Film Festival, but never secured a wide theatrical or streaming release in the United States. Gilroy, who has a track record of championing politically charged documentaries (he produced the Oscar-winning “The Prison in Twelve Minutes”), saw the film several years ago and began working with Zhao on an English-language adaptation.

Pedro Pascal’s involvement came later. The actor, a frequent Gilroy collaborator (the two worked together on the Netflix film “The Bubble” and Gilroy’s “Andor” series), was drawn to the material’s quiet fury. Pascal recorded the narration in a single session earlier this year, according to production sources, and his voice becomes the film’s only sustained human presence amid the grinding machinery.

The NY Film Festival run is slated for early October 2026, with a limited theatrical release to follow. Festival director Dennis Lim praised the film as “a monumental work of ecological and social witness that has only grown more urgent in the years since it was made.”

“Behemoth!” premieres as part of the festival’s Spotlight section, reserved for notable restorations and rediscoveries. Tickets go on sale to the public in September.

Source: Hollywood Reporter