Horses

Today I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary Horses. For once living in Toronto paid off and I took advantage of HotDocs being in town. The film is directed by Liz Mermin and chronicles the exciting world of steeplechase racing in Ireland.

The documentary blog has posted a great interview where Liz goes into more depth about the film. Overall, I really enjoyed the film – It’s very easy to fall into the sentimental trap when you are dealing with horses (ahem, see Flicka, The Black Stallion, etc), but I found this documentary to be a great fly-on-the-wall treatment of the hustling and bustling world of the Paul Nolan racing stable.

My only issue is that there didn’t seem to be much of an arc in the story – we were introduced to the three featured horses, they ran some races and that was it.  I realize that the documentary can’t invent a narrative, but it might have been worthwhile to spend some more time going into the history of the farm, the people that worked there and take a deeper look into their relationships with the horses.  There was one groom/exercise rider in particular that seemed to have an amazing bond with the horses and I wish he had gotten more screen time.  But this is a small criticism and I still enjoyed the film immensely.  It really made me appreciate the skill and athleticism of steeplechase horses.

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Incredible.