Ashley Avis was looking to give her a modern twist on Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s classic novel about a horse’s struggles and hardships. So when it came time to adapt the book for a new generation of moviegoers, Avis chose its equine protagonist as a wild horse from the Onaqui Mountains in Utah. The movie debuted on Disney+ in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, but the journey didn’t end with the release of “Black Beauty.”
While researching the issues facing the wild horses for this film, Avis discovered the controversial way in which government officials treat the 80,000 wild horses that currently live on 245 million acres of public land. But Avis didn’t stop there. I decided to make a documentary, “Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West,” that explores the efforts of the Bureau of Land Management to remove and hold these horses in captivity to make room for millions of cattle and sheep to graze the land.
“I grew up with horses, and I love horses,” Avis says. “But I had no idea that this was happening. And that’s annoying because if horses don’t know this is happening, what about the general public?”
The bureau claimed they do this to ensure horses are not crowded or to prevent them from destroying wildlife habitats such as grouse. But Avis says these justifications are always changing and spurious.
“They keep coming up with different reasons,” she says. “They should be put under a microscope to change their narrative many times.”
Avis and her crew spent four years doing just that, and at one point were able to film a government excerpt. Footage they filmed showed officials using helicopters to guard the horses, an approach that the film says terrifies the animals, causing some to break their legs and necks. “We tried very hard to notice the devastation we felt,” Avis says.
She believes that part of the problem is the lack of empathy shown by these officials (one bureaucrat has claimed that horses “just breed, honey. They don’t feel”).
Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West is looking for distribution, but it’s already beginning to make its way around the film festival circuit, showing at the Newport Film Festival and the Los Angeles Duke, where it won Best Director and Best Cinematography. Avis hopes the film will inspire viewers to participate by writing for lawmakers and President Joe Biden. And you want the film to spark a broader discussion.
“It may start with wild horses, but it’s really about how to protect our larger wild world,” Avis says. “If we can get people to pay attention to the horses, perhaps there can be a ripple effect of people’s awareness of what’s going on in our common lands. We need to find a better balance between the humans who live in the world and not just try to control it, control it, and annex it to us.”
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