Director: Benedikt Erlingsson | Iceland | Fiction | 2013 | 81 mins
Film source: Music Box Films
Introduced by John Killacky
Iceland’s official 2014 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film, Benedikt Erlingsson’s gorgeously shot Of Horses and Men is a riotously funny and bitingly ironic look at life and love in a small rural community in Iceland’s northern highlands, where horses outnumber humans and the only thing that travels fast is gossip and innuendo. Like Sherwood Anderson’s collection of interconnected short stories Winesburg, Ohio, the vignettes in Of Horses and Men are related but self-sufficient narratives which each contribute a variation on the theme of the absurdity of the human condition. Be it the foolhardy drunk who rides his steed across frigid waters to obtain bootlegged vodka from a Russian tanker, or the tentative lovers whose courtship is soured by the lustful passions of their horses, Of Horses and Men proposes in tragically farcical fashion that human desires aren’t all that different from animal instincts when man is driven to desperate measures.