Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There are many names that sit like Kings of old on the throne of the nation’s favourite race horse and whatever the rights and wrongs of which there are plenty on either side of the argument, the fact that an animal is so revered is one of the great pleasures in life for many millions of people.

The names trip off the tongue as if being pulled by a Heavy Horse making a furrow for planting, Nijinsky, Arkle, Best Mate, Hyperion, Lottery, Frankel, Desert Orchid, Sea Biscuit and of course one of the most loved of all, the dynamic Red Rum. Into the mix of thoroughbreds and winners surely for plain determination and the impact it had on a small Welsh community, Dream Alliance should stand shoulder to shoulder with them all.

In Dark Horse, Louise Osmond’s energetic and cinematically vibrant documentary, the story of Dream Alliance and that community comes out to greet the cinema goer like steam hitting the cold air at dusk.

Horse Racing has long had different monikers attached to it, The Sport of Kings and The People’s Sport are but two, and both sides of this racing community are shown in Dark Horse. Louise Osmond captures the partition between the two by driving home the monetary aspect in which the sport depends, but carefully also showing the time and dedication, and indeed love, required to bring a horse to the national attention and to make it be a champion.

That nurturing, never say die spirit is encapsulated in Jan Vokes and the rest of her syndicate team. This is a woman who ran the bar of her local working men’s club and cleaned aisles at the local supermarket in Blackwood in pursuit to take on the so called established big boys of the racing world, and she did it with a horse that was raised on an allotment, had the local community fall in love with it and who despite a serious injury, an injury in another time that would have seen it put to sleep, come back and win the Welsh National and then famously come second in 2010 at Aintree in the Grand National.

This is not just a story about a horse beloved by its community and the wider world but of a woman’s own determination to prove the world wrong. Whatever the thoughts on horse racing, it is film that shows dogged resistance to being told that you’re not good enough, not refined enough, not able enough to fight for something and that you don’t come from the right background to matter, is all in the end, just empty veiled threats by those wishing to keep you in your place. It is a film of endearing quality and Jan Vokes, her resilient syndicate team and of course Dream Alliance, capture a spirit of determination once called, perhaps with disdain in some quarters, the Dunkirk Spirit, but is in truth, just a person not willing to lay down and die and be told what to do by those with money and supposed breeding.

A marvellous documentary, Dark Horse is epic in its stature and far and away better than any cinemagraphic experience that deals with the sport.

Ian D. Hall