Of Horses and Men – Cut film

Oh Cut, I love you for this. On a dark Suffolk night, to go out and see this unexpected landscape and story from Iceland. The original Icelandic title is Hross í oss: that is, Horse in Us. Wild stark beauty of an uninterrupted land scape, where folk observe events of neighbour through binoculars. The handsome man on a white mare, is shamed by a stallion mounting the mare, while he is mounted on it. He knows all have seen. He returns and shoots the beautiful white mare. The woman who loves him, castrates her stallion. A strong woman herds a half dozen horses, inspires a lad to want to ride. The lad gets lost in a storm. With a swiss army penknife, kills the horse, cuts and empties it’s entrails and crawls inside. A man mounts a horse, and gets it to swim to a Russian tanker, boards, scores some neat vodka, returns, drinks the neat poison, and dies. The woman who wants the man, seduces him, while the others watch through binoculars. Everything happens in this vast treeless landscape. Horses are the subjects, the camera lingering on them, while humans act around. All scenes begin in a horses eyes. Brutal, wonderful, definitely not Halesworth, in Halesworth.