GUWAHATI, March 16 � Bringing laurels to the state, Roopa Barua�s Riders of the Mist, a documentary on bareback pony racing in Jorhat, was given the Best Documentary Award at the Houston Indian Film Festival, Texas USA.
Roopa grew up in the town of Jorhat where bareback pony racing had been an annual tradition in the local gymkhana for the past 135 years. Thinking that she wanted to document this phenomenon before its final curtain call, she started researching the horses only to find out that they were semi-feral and fended for themselves in the riverine islands of the Brahmaputra. They swam the river and came to participate in the races. This looked very quirky and one of a kind, so Roopa decided to film it immediately and put it into the documentary format.
This documentary is a portrayal of the races as they unfold, the jockeys and their lives and these ponies that become part of the tradition every year.
Houston Indian Film Festival was Roopa's first film festival as she had shown it as special previews only twice in India before that. The storytelling in the documentary strikes a chord with the audience, specially the horse loving ones. Seeing the horses go back to the wild made the audience emotional in Texas, which is legendary for horses and cowboys.
On a more creative level, the 65-minute story carries an impact and keeps the interest level up. Hemanti Sarkar has done the editing of the film and the cinematography was done by Dr Vikram Srivastava.
Riders of the Mist has also been selected as one of the top ten documentaries to watch from India in 2015 by Longlivecinema.com, a popular movie blogging site. Here it was listed along with several award winning documentaries like An American in Madras (Karan Bali), Jai Ho on AR Rahman(UmeshAgarwal) and Proposition for a Revolution (Vinay Shukla).