A short documentary for Arbor about the horse wranglers of central Anatolia, who bring their herds down from the hills to water every evening.
Arbor makes clothes for people who work outside, so Samir proposed a film with no product shots at all: three weeks with a family of horse wranglers near Kayseri, filmed at the two times of day the work actually happens. The jackets are in the film because the riders wore them, and that was the only brief we followed.
Leo Hartmann shot on a lightweight large-format camera with two zooms, so the crew could ride in the back of a pickup and keep pace with the herd without stopping to change lenses. There is no artificial light in the film. Sunset scenes were planned to the minute, and the dawn material was shot in the twenty minutes of blue light before the sun clears the ridge.
Mira Kowalczyk recorded hooves, breath and water on separate microphones at the river crossing, and that recording became the spine of the mix. Lior Ashkenazi's score enters only once, when the herd breaks into a run.
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The Lowlands / Documentary
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