Movie review:
"UnReined" By Conventionality By JoAnn Grose "UnReined” (2020) is a different kind of horse movie – a documentary that’s completely unanthropomorphic and completely un-romantic. No violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor here, gasping about her love for The Pie in “National Velvet” (1944). More like clear-eyed Buck Brannaman, explaining how his abusive childhood helped him communicate with troubled horses in “Buck” (2011). Co-produced, co-directed and co-filmed in sepia desert tones by Marcia Rock and Naomi Guttman-Bass, “UnReined” shares the remarkable life of Nancy Zeitlin, a brave and down-to-earth woman who told her parents in 1968 she was not moving from San Diego to Israel unless they bought her a horse. She was 11 then and already knew that being with a horse, any horse, is dwelling in “a holy place.” In her own words, Zeitlin was good at choosing horses, but her personal life has been “somewhat of an obstacle course.” Men are harder to read; if you’ve been around horses (or men) at all, you know that. Her life is the history of the Middle East for the past half century, thanks to horses. For 20 years she held the Israeli high-jumping record. When the Intifada intensified, she lost her hopes of funding for an Olympic ride. She married an Orthodox Jew, an Israeli who drifted into orthodoxy, and a Palestinian. She was (is) the single mother of two sons, one of whom has also become more than right-wing in his religious beliefs. She trained Israeli, Palestinian and Ethiopian/Israeli riders. Today she still trains and judges, and last March she graduated from law school with distinction.
Like swimming, riding is one of those sports that has not been particularly welcoming to people of color, even to white people of modest means. Zeitlin devoted years to changing that, many of those years in direct and physical danger. Unless you’re British royalty, Bruce Springsteen’s or Aristotle Onassis’ daughters, you don’t assume you can ride your way into the Olympics. Most people don’t even get to ride regularly. The sight of Zeitlin’s rag-tag riders competing (and winning) will warm the coldest of hearts. This mission alone is enough to make her life a memorable one. More amazing to this viewer, though, is the evidently uncrossable chasm between secular and orthodox Jews – evidently as deep and unchanging as the divide between Israeli and Palestinian. Zeitlin shares a lengthy, matterof-fact conversation with a Palestinian protégé along the lines of: “If I didn’t know you, I’d want you dead.” But it seems a lot like the political divide we need to bridge with knowledge in our post-election society here in the USA. She finds a common ground and meets her “enemies” there. How many people, I wonder, can we meet in stables so they can learn we’re not raving lunatics on either side of our American divide.
Nancy Zeitlin teaching a stable management class in Jericho, 2000
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JoAnn Grose is the former movie critic for The Charlotte Observer who got her first horse, a buckskin Quarter Horse named Matt Dillon, when she was 55.
Nancy Zeitlin riding Hope
Khaled Efranji and Nancy Zeitlin
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