Buoyantly crafted by filmmaker Louise Osmond, Dark Horse is a life-affirming underdog story that will touch the hearts of anyone who has dared to dream.
In early 2000, in a tiny village in one of the poorest mining valleys in Wales, Jan Vokes, the barmaid at the local men’s club, hatches a crazy plan to take on the “sport of kings” and breed a racehorse by getting a group of locals to all pitch in 10 pounds a week. They raise their horse on a hillside made of slag from the coal mine and nurture it to maturity. Reflecting their pride and flights of fancy, they name their horse Dream Alliance. To the astonishment of the racing elite, Dream becomes an unlikely champion, beating the finest thoroughbreds in the land. Then, in one fateful race, the horse—which embodies the plucky band of misfits’ hopes and dreams—has a near-fatal accident. Nursed back to health through the love of his owners, Dream makes a remarkable recovery, returning to the track for a heart-pounding comeback.
Incredible story from two local filmmakers from Salt Lake City.
Despite a small population with a brief history in the U.S., Samoans and Tongans are 28 times more likely than any other minority group to play football for the famed NFL. Filmed over four years, filmmaker Vainuku tracks the journeys of four talented Polynesian high school football players as they strive toward their lifelong, and potentially life-changing, goal of professional recruitment.
Their speedy transformation from adolescence to adulthood in the high-stakes world of collegiate football is filmed with incredible access, shining a light on the extreme pressures to succeed that emanate from within the tightly knit Polynesian community, as well as from the outside.
But gang violence, addiction, and poverty are a constant danger that can easily bring down a dream. Even with the best moms, siblings, and friends cheering from the grandstands, not everyone makes it to the big time.
With an unprecedented access to the Chinese communist government, filmmaker Hao Zhou provides the audience with an in-depth, fly-on-the-wall look into a communists government as the country tries to preserve the past in a frantic, rapid building of the future. O nce thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Tanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite.
Ever since the invention of radio and television, humans have been sending signals into outer space, announcing their existence to other civilizations. The Visit documents an event that has never taken place: humans’ first encounter with intelligent life from another world. Through tantalizing interviews with experts from NASA, United Nations, and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, among many others, acclaimed Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen constructs a chillingly believable scenario of first contact on Earth, beginning with the simplest of questions: Why are you here? How do you think? What do you see in humans that we don’t see in ourselves? The implications unfold within a mind-bending landscape of everyday sights and sounds that Madsen succeeds in turning bizarre and extraordinary, as if seen through the eyes of a life form exploring our planet for the first time. The Visit takes viewers on a journey beyond their terrestrial perspective, revealing the fears, hopes, and rituals of a species forced to confront alien life forms that may or may not view us as a threat.
See you at the festival!
XXX
Raymond Lo
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