Autism and the horse

Jateen | Movies | September 12, 2009 at 10:57 am

I received this letter as a member of the Landmark Theatres Film Club. It is a letter from the director of the movie, The Horse Boy (2009). A film about how parents cope with their autistic child with the help of a horse.

Dear Film Club Member,

I want to take you into a different world. A world where the borders between perception, reality and the spirit world blur. A world where horses can heal, and where the wilderness offers sanctuary, as well as danger. A world where love is tested to its limits, where shamans dance among the mountains, and where one small boy can change the life of everyone around him.

In 2004 my son Rowan was first diagnosed with autism. The feeling was like being hit across the face with a baseball bat. Grief, shame—this weird, irrational shame—as if I had somehow cursed this child by giving him my faulty genetics. Watching him recede, float away from me, as if separated by the see-through barrier of a dream.

I had to find a way into his world. I found it, incredibly, through a horse—Betsy.

When Rowan first met Betsy, her reaction to him was so gentle, so submissive that—as a lifelong horse trainer—I knew he had some kind of direct line to her. The first time I put him up on her back, he began to speak. I had found my way in.

What I could not know in that first, miraculous moment, was that this first day on a horse in rural Texas would take us halfway across the world in search of a healing that many—sometimes even myself—thought was madness.

This is not a story about the tragedy of autism. This is a story about how, as a family, we took a leap of faith that resulted in—well—the defining experience of our lives.

Please come with us.

— Rupert Isaacson, producer and author of the book The Horse Boy

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333668/