10/22 (Tue) Competition “Of Horses and Men” Press Conference
 
Benedikt Erlingsson (Director/Screenplay)
Fridrik Thór Fridriksson (Producer)
 
One would be hard pressed to find a film with a title that described its content more accurately than the Icelandic feature “Of Horses and Men.” Director Benedikt Erlingsson has endeavored to make the first movie to ever look at life from a horse’s point of view, and though that’s simplifying matters a bit, his project is certainly unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. There isn’t a plot, though there are narrative processes that blend together. In the first part, a man cajoles his white mare into allowing him to saddle and then mount her. Staged like a flirtatious dance, the segment is electric with sexual possibility, and when the man finally mounts the horse and rides her to a neighbor’s house for a meal, it’s both triumphant and suspenseful, especially set against the wide, spare, magnificent Icelandic countryside. All the neighbors watch him trot proudly by through their binoculars, and as he dines his mare stands outside, agitated as a black stallion breaks through his enclosure. When the man comes out to return home, the stallion shows up at the same time and mounts the mare in one of the more bizarre comic tableau you’ll ever see in a film. The consequences for the mare, however, are tragic, since the man seems to take seriously the special relationship that humans have with horses.

 
“Why did I do that?” Erlingsson replied when one journalist expressed puzzlement at his choices. “I wanted to surprise the audience. The story should take turns that open the viewer to new experiences. I wanted to attack the clichés you usually see in movies, the Hollywood rules. If something happens that you don’t expect, you think about it more.”
 
So during the course of the 81-minute film, two horses die, as do two men (who receive almost identical funeral services), one man is blinded, and another saves his own life during a snowstorm by crawling into a horse carcass. Some of these scenes are funny, while others are fraught with pain and discomfort. Erlingsson and his producer, Fridrik Thór Fridriksson assured the assembled reporters that no horse actually lost his or her life during the making of the film, but some scenes would never make it past PETA had they been made in the states. Certainly the most bizarre segment involved a farmer riding his horse out into a fjord to an anchored Russian freighter to buy some vodka, which Erlingsson said is very expensive when bought legitimately in Iceland. “Icelandic horses are great swimmers,” he said. “There are lots of old stories about horses swimming out to boats, and because there are so many islands and rivers, horses have to deal with water a lot. They and their owners need a special mentality to do that.”

 
The movie doesn’t try to understand horses or the special relationship horses have with humans. Basically it uses that relationship to show how life and death are the same for all species. “The thing about death is that it is essentially tragicomic,” said the director. “I took a very sarcastic, humorous view.” He also believes that all life flows from the female spirit. “The real heroes of the film are women,” he pointed out. “In Iceland women are the underlying current of life, and if you have a group of horses the mare is the central force. The stallion is just the protector.”
 
Apparently, the same credo applies to acting. The central human character is Sólveig, who is played by Erlingsson’s Danish wife, Charlotte Bøving, but even the most important male horse in the movie, the one a Spanish tourist rides into a blizzard, was played by a female horse.
 
“That’s right. I used a female horse to play a male,” Erlingsson admitted. “In fact, that horse showed up at the cinema for the premier in Iceland. She’s a star.”
 
Competition
“Of Horses and Men”