Sardinia, 1940. The harmless term “horsing around” takes on a very serious and ultimately tragic meaning for 14-year-old Michele and his 11-year-old friend Ventura. When they learn that the peasants have sold their best horses for serious money to the state and thus to the military for the approaching war, the two boys take a decision that is as naïve as it is intuitive: They free the herd in a daring nighttime operation. Their happiness is short-lived. Betrayed by a villager, they are caught on the way home and Ventura is shot dead. A senseless death? Or a sign of special bravery, as the ambiguous Sardinian film title suggests?
Director Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian himself, has dedicated his late animation debut to his grandmother who once told him the story. He took the liberty of adapting it with brushstrokes on paper, his style drawing primarily on the charms of historical painting schools, animation techniques and cinema genres. Columbu’s associative visual language, marked by shades of black, white, and grey, is animated by impulsive hatchings, countless dots, and generous elisions. The soundtrack, too, sets rather sparse nuances – subtle illustrations that draw on Sardinian cultural traditions while opening a space for universal metaphors.

A man throws off the shackles of slavery, lays the traditional Kente cloth aside, puts on a business suit – and starts to walk towards the future. Or towards what he thinks is the future, because this is not a pleasant walk: To the cheers of the people, the man pushes into the backroom of an Asian restaurant where he flogs plots of land, moves to the next backroom, money case in hand, to bribe the pastor and ultimately ends up on stage to give a state-supporting speech as President – against corruption, of course. The career of our nameless protagonist – whose sunglasses-covered face, interestingly, we get to see only in the limelight – takes him right through the streets of an African metropolis, past protests being suppressed, through a dilapidated infrastructure, criminal gangs, and even natural disasters.
Nobody has thrown off the shackles of slavery in Francis Yushau Brown’s relentlessly critical film. Instead, a few individuals have chained themselves to nepotism and keep the rest of the population poor and backwards. His film is a 3D indictment brimming with rage, including of the Western and Far Eastern (neo) colonizers. And far above hover the enraged gods, waiting for the people to put an end to this situation at last.