Horse Camp

A door opens, a cone of light falls into the room, then darkness again. As the door opens a second time, this time from the inside, two people slip out who had apparently retreated into the room - for a moment of undisturbed intimacy?

Ella Gallieni´s short film Horse Camp offers a glance into the mysterious world of a film studio. The scenes, shot in black and white, are not arranged as a coherent whole. Only speculation is possible about the actual film being made there. Rather than showing work processes - only very few scenes show people actually working - Gallieni focuses on moments in between: moments of waiting, coming and going, an atmosphere of absent-mindedness that can switch spontaneously to anger or exuberance. While some of the crew listen to announcements during the time between shootings, another one sets off with a microphone and diving goggles to explore the sounds of the building. The setting of equipment, which Gallieni repeatedly shifts into the picture like ornamental frames, makes the miniature scenes appear like flotsam in a narrative flow. They laconically traverse the interface between fiction and documentation, control and coincidence. Even the title is a cryptic play with signifiers: Horse Camp evokes the term "hors champ", the off, a place beyond the screen, from where these images shift back into visibility and audibility, from where they were excluded. It is not until a long tracking shot at the end, which seems like a paraphrase of Godard, that the participants are united in one scene. Nonetheless, on the sound track, everything remains unclear.

(Dominik Kamalzadeh)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt


What´s happening when nothing happens? A movie about gaps, intervals, transitions and spaces in between. Nevertheless: no ponies. You can´t have it all.

(Production Note)


Horse Camp aims to explore the outskirts of conventional narrative strategies to grasp the non-tellable. How does one live "hors champ"? Why is fiction sometimes more "real" than reality? And why do our own lives often seem so unreal to us?
Shot in a day as a part of a 3-month short film project the film turned out to be - more than anything else - a visual testimony of a transgression.

(Director´s Comment)