Mongolia's Gobi desert is the site of one of the largest illegal gold rushes of modern times, worked by informal miners known as "ninjas," named for the pans they carry strapped to their backs like tortoise shells. Journalist Aidan Hartley travels through the mining camps talking to the miners themselves, along with traders, environmentalists, and government officials, to piece together how an entire informal economy grew up outside the law. He finds children as young as six working alongside their parents, digging narrow shafts by hand and risking collapse and injury for a living. The miners process the ore with mercury, a method that poisons soil and water and works its way into the desert's food chain, and Hartley traces that contamination back to the herders and communities downstream. The film sets the human stakes, families with no other income, against the environmental damage the ninjas leave behind, without offering either side an easy way out of the tradeoff.