The Horse is at once harsh and elegiac, the hauntingstory of a father-and-son relationship in the midst of hopeless poverty.A peasant and his son arrive in Istanbul hoping to sell enoughmerchandise to send the boy to school, but their simplest dreamsconflict with the ugly economic realities that are unblinkingly observedby director Ali Özgentü;rk. Quasi-documentary images give wayto the surreal, capturing both the physical and emotional aspects ofmodern Turkish life, which will exact a primitive, barbarous sacrificeof the father. "I wanted to make the hero a man who normally wouldnever become the main character of a film," Özgentü;rkwrote. "I wanted to transform dull death, a dull enthusiasm anddull yearning into pictures, to make a movie in such a way that youdon't realize it is a movie. I wanted to interweave problems of everydaylife so closely into the story of this film that they seem to be nolonger common at all."