Mountain Plain Mountain

As part of Horsepower, Plokta presents:

Deepening confusion becomes a delightful experience watching this collaborative film by Daniel Jacoby and Araki Yu. The documentary observes the sounds and rhythms of Ban’ei, a rare kind of draft horse race that takes place only in Obihiro, Japan. The twist is, we never see the race itself.

Instead, witness behind-the-scenes operations, arcane-sounding commentary and technological apparatuses. The film gradually twists itself into a knot as the excited voices of the commentators merge into a frenzy of gibberish – creating a new kind of reality, an imaginary phenomenon concealed behind a poetic kind of infrastructure.