The Horse is at once harsh and elegiac, the haunting story of a father-and-son relationship in the midst of hopeless poverty. A peasant and his son arrive in Istanbul hoping to sell enough merchandise to send the boy to school, but their simplest dreams conflict with the ugly economic realities that are unblinkingly observed by director Ali Ozgenturk. Quasi-documentary images give way to the surreal, capturing both the physical and emotional aspects of modern Turkish life, which will exact a primitive, barbarous sacrifice of the father. "I wanted to make the hero a man who normally would never become the main character of a film," Ozgenturk writes. "I wanted to transform dull death, a dull enthusiasm and dull yearning into pictures, to make a movie in such a way that you don't realize it is a movie. I wanted to interweave problems of everyday life so closely into the story of this film that they seem to be no longer common at all."