Synopsis
A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with terrible consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.
2013 ‘Hross í oss’ Directed by Benedikt Erlingsson
A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with terrible consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.
Ingvar E. Sigurðsson Charlotte Bøving Steinn Ármann Magnússon Kristbjörg Kjeld Helgi Björnsson Kjartan Ragnarsson Sigríður María Egilsdóttir Juan Camillo Roman Estrada Johann Pall Oddson Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir Vilborg Halldórsdóttir Kash Erden Baater Atli Rafn Sigurðsson Ólafur Flosason Erlingur Gíslason Hallmar Sigurðsson Kjartan Bjargmundsson María Ellingsen Svandís Dóra Einarsdóttir Juris Zablockis Ikor Lezhenko
Storie di cavalli e di uomini, Om heste og mænd, Des chevaux et des hommes, Historias de caballos y hombres, Lovak és emberek, 馬々と人間たち, Om hester og menn, O koniach i ludziach, Despre oameni si cai, Zgodbe o konjih in ljudeh, De caballos y hombres, Om hästar och män, О лошадях и людях, Von Menschen und Pferden, 马与人, על סוסים ואנשים, Om Heste Og Mænd, De cavalls i homes, За хората и конете, Atlar ve insanlar, O koňoch a ľuďoch, Коні та люди
This strange celebration of man's long standing relationship with horses and their natural habitat is an odd but never less than engaging experience. Director Benedikt Erlingsson forgoes a straight narrative arc to instead tell the story through a range of interwoven vignettes. Each one focusing on a different member of the community in this isolated Icelandic coastal village.
A proud looking man rides his beautiful white mare as the other villagers watch her elegant stride from a distance. He is something of a catch in these parts, the middle-aged woman he shares lunch with as bewitched as the horse he rides in on. On his return home his arrogant control of the beast is undone when a black stallion mounts…
At times fun and peculiar, but equally frustratingly empty. Of Horses and Men is a little too in love with its own irreverence and a more grounded central story would have gone a long way.
Of Horses and Men (Hross í oss) is one hell of a peculiar film. A curious mixture of nature documentary, character study and ethnographic anecdote, all set against the sparse, timelessness of the Icelandic landscape.
Benedikt Erlingsson's cinematic oddity takes the form of a number of interconnected short stories touting the inter-relationship between humans and horses. Sometimes the humans take the foreground, sometimes the humans. They watch us. We watch them. They run and rut. We run and rut. We get drunk. They eat grass. It is all fun and games until someone loses and eye (or some self respect).
The beauty of Of Horses and Men in the tone. Graceful yet quirky, pepped up by David Thor Jonsson's jaunty…
“I’m the boss now.”
Director Benedikt Erlingsson’s debut is an unbelievably peculiar film, filled with subtle humor and a very lighthearted feeling to it. It tells five interlinked stories of horse-owners set in a village in the countryside of Iceland, all with the same underlying message: love. At the beginning of the film love is a taboo, something no one speaks of, but that slowly changes as the villagers’ shared love of horses becomes more and more evident and with it their love for one another. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but even then I could not stop watching.
I watched Woman at War (the director’s most recent feature) yesterday so I was able to pick up…
horses are just cars that fuck and die. oh shit, that's how they came up with transformers isn't it
The brilliant Woman at War was easily one of the best films I saw last year.
Benedikt Erlingsson's feature debut, Of Horses and Men, is a comparative disappointment but I think it would be wrong to judge it too harshly knowing now the remarkable improvements he showed with his follow-up.
I do like these sorts of comedy-dramas that, early doors, work mostly as a collection of vignettes before being pulled together later on. The main fault here is that when they do connect together they are done so in such a lax way that it's difficult to see much of a connection between them at all.
Also, not all the segments really work because not too much…
March Around The World 2018 #21: Iceland
A bunch of interlinked stories about the relationships between people and horses in a small Icelandic town? Uh, sign me up, I guess? This is exactly the kind of film I love discovering as part of this challenge - it feels utterly unlike anything I've seen before, and offers an intriguing set of postcards from an unusual part of the world.
Oh, and it's really good, which helps. The stories mostly revolve around sex and death - universal themes for humans and horses - and vary in tone from hilarious to tragic, but mostly contain elements of both. There's a tale of mutual attraction between two breeders (and their significantly more proactive horses),…
Iceland’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards is indeed a delightful curiosity: an anthology of interwoven stories giving us a wry and affectionate examination of the symbiotic relationships between man, horse and the barren, volcanic Icelandic landscape.
Of Horses and Men is set in a rural community populated by eccentric characters and the equine companions around which their lives so heavily revolve.
In opening tale we meet Kolbeinn (Sigurðsson), who seems to be quite the pin up for the local housewives, as he readies both himself and his long-lashed, silver mare to tentatively woo neighbour, Solveig (Bøving). In what is just the first of the absurd images within the film, Kolbeinn vainly parades through…
A lot of very interesting things going on here: textural, tactile film-making from the opening credits onwards, and it makes good on its environmentalist sympathies by putting animals' stories on the same footing as human ones without any kind of anthropomorphisation. I'm not sure I would have called it a comedy, even by the ultra-dry standards Icelandic directors favour; there's one scene which could only be considered comedic if you assume Benedikt Erlingsson is somehow spoofing The Revenant before it was made. (No, nobody gets attacked by a bear) But between this, Woman at War (which I'll review soon) and his anomalous but strangely fitting documentary project The Show of Shows, Erlingsson can stand tall as one of the most promising and thematically consistent directors the current decade has produced.