Dark Horse

A Welsh village whose mine has closed. Jan Vokes, working behind a bar, gets an idea: breed a racehorse. She has neither the money nor the knowledge. She talks about twenty people in the village into it, each putting in ten pounds a week. They buy a mare, and the foal is named Dream Alliance. The horse is raised on an allotment. Then it starts racing, and winning, and eventually runs in one of the biggest races in Britain. There is also a serious injury along the way. Louise Osmond directs; eighty-six minutes. The syndicate members tell it themselves. It won the documentary audience award at Sundance in 2015. What it is about is less the horse than the village: the one thing these people could do together after the pit closed.