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OSCARS 2014 Iceland

From the horse’s mouth: Erlingsson will fight for Iceland’s Oscar nomination

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- Icelandic actor-turned-director Benedikt Erlingsson’s feature debut Of Horses and Men is Iceland’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Feature nomination

From the horse’s mouth: Erlingsson will fight for Iceland’s Oscar nomination

Kolbeinn loves Solveig, and Solveig loves Kolbeinn, but Kolbeinn is also in love with his prized possession and darling, the mare Grána, and Grána is obsessed with the stallion Brúnn. This cannot end well.

Confused?

“The idea is to show the beauty of the union of man and animal as well as to present the peculiar and the ludicrous,” said Icelandic actor-turned-director Benedikt Erlingsson, whose feature debut, Of Horses and Men [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
film profile
]
, has been selected by Iceland’s Oscar committee (the Icelandic Film & TV Academy) as this year’s official Icelandic contender for the Academy Award nomination as Best Foreign-Language Feature.

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Also scripted by Erlingsson, and starring Ingvar E Sigurdsson, Charlotte Bøving and Steinn Ármann Magnússon, Of Horses and Men is described as a country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse’s in the human, an ensemble film that tells stories of love and death.

“The Icelandic horse is a special breed of extreme genetic purity. Its popularity abroad is ever increasing, as witnesses by the growth of special clubs dedicated to it, regular world championships and sizable populations in Europe and North America,” explained Icelandic producer Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, who shares the director’s passion for horses and the bond between man and horse. Fridriksson directed Iceland’s so far only Oscar-nominated feature, Children of Nature, which ran in 1992.

The struggles in the life of men and horses are often shown from the horses' point of view, and in the end all is tied together in the annual autumn round-up of the horses in the Hrossabrestur production with Germany’s Mogador Film, which is currently in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival (September 20-28) and will continue at the Tokyo Film Festival between 17-25 October.

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