Ride Above

11/11/2022

While it happily avoids current Hollywood story formula, this astonishing film is well served by the Withdrawal-Devastation-Return structure that it inherits from Mediterranean oral epic. Yet it was not the film’s durable structure that mesmerized me and the rest of its first American audience Friday night at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. What astonished me was the extraordinary moral depth of this achingly beautiful story and world from Writer/Director Christian Duguay. His film is emotionally riveting from the first scene to the last. The movie is well grounded in the quintessential theme of cinematic, horse-themed stories: emotional honesty as the basis for meaningful relationships, despite, in the last scenes of the film, some surprising chicanery that illustrate