Yesterday I got to take a group of my students to see Dream Horse as part of the Student Screening Program with the Sundance Film Festival. Even though arranging field trips is equal parts planning the D-Day invasion and herding cats, this particular field trip always ends up being an amazing experience and yesterday was no exception! I absolutely loved the film we saw and, more importantly, so did my students! It is a true story (which is also told in the documentary Dark Horse which premiered at Sundance in 2016) about Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) who lived in an economically depressed village in Wales with her unemployed husband Brian (Owen Teale). She worked two dead-end jobs, as a checker in a big-box retail store during the day and as a barmaid in the evening, and cared for her elderly parents. She longed for something to inspire her to get out of bed every day. One night a man in the bar named Howard Davies (Damian Lewis) brags to the crowd that he was once part of a syndicate that owned a racehorse. Jan decides that she wants to own a racehorse and recruits Howard to help her. She uses all of her savings to buy a mare that came in last in every race she ran and then creates her own syndicate of friends from the bar (including the town drunk and a lonely widow) to help her pay the stud fee of a champion. They name their foal Dream Alliance and keep him on their small allotment of land. They eventually convince a well-known trainer (Nicholas Farrell) to work with Dream Alliance and, when he begins winning races against all odds, he becomes a symbol of hope for the whole village. I loved the scenes where the eccentric syndicate members watch the races in the owners' boxes with the aristocracy and I really enjoyed the racing sequences because they are so exhilarating (the students cheered out loud multiple times). This is such a feel good movie about doing whatever it takes to achieve your dreams and it was perfect for my students! There was a Q&A after the film with Euros Lyn, the director, and he told the students that despite what people tell them they should always follow their dreams no matter how out of reach they might appear to be! I loved that! One student asked him how the people of Wales have responded to the film and he answered that Sundance audiences are the very first to see it but he hopes that all of the audiences respond the way that we did! This will be my final student screening and I'm glad that I picked a good one to end on!
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