HORSE-BEING by Jerome Clement-Wilz @ Kino Svetozor (Prague, CZ)
Etre cheval (Documentary, France). This screening was part of the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and took place on 9/03/2016, 14:00.
I'm going to be honest, I was pretty curious about the film, because I am curious about fetishism in general. Any chance I get to watch a film on the cinema dealing with strange and little known about forms of fetishism, I see them, not least of all because part of the fun of watching them in a roomful of people is to see what kind of reactions it inspires.
Firstly, the problem was that I could have missed it. The festival failed to tell me that they would not be giving tickets to the press for the screenings that would take place in small rooms of the two room cinemas involved in One World, or some other cinemas. I was told that I should have know that from reading this info at the back of the press badge. Given the fact that I am officially an international reporter, I don't speak Czech, because no one speaks Czech, not even the Czechs speak Czechs well, or so I'm told. But the sad fact of the matter is that this one is on me, because I have been living in this country, and still do not know any Czech at all. And probably won't learn any time soon, because I am decadent in my alienation.
In the end I was able to have my way with the girl at the ticket stand by being charming and polite. So, the screening would take place in a small screening room. And a film about fetishism at 14:00 in the afternoon is just after lunch, so would some people have extreme reactions to the film? In reality, I wasn't expecting a Jan Soldat production. I was expecting what I exactly got - a film about fetishism that uses this unusual subject to explore a certain liberation experienced by an individual through it and even dares, surprisingly successfully, to become a documentary that refuses conventional categorization of gender or any form of existance; the protagonist takes part in a harrowing training known as pony-play in which she transforms into a horse.
But its not sexual or exploitative. Never in its full duration did I hear any sort of uncomfortable or childish giggling. Not that the film inspired it at all, in fact, it is far from doing so.
Horse-Being was meant to be one of the films I would get an interview for. Unfortunately I found out on the night before I was meant to interview its director Jerome Clement-Wilz that he would not be coming. While on the subject, I would have had another interview on that very same day with the protagonist of another documentary, who also cancelled. But I was still quite happy to have seen my first interesting movie of the festival, and even went on to recommend it to a few people.