THE impetus for telling equestrian educator Buck Branneman’s story on film was his theories and practical abilities giving rise to books and the feature film “The Horse Whisperer”.

Their mother’s death when they were small left Buck and his older brother in the control of an alcoholic, violent father. The local sheriff heard of their plight and put them into care of foster parents, of whom the wife appears in the film with some delightful down-home reality checks.

The film follows Buck spending nine months a year travelling to and fro across the US holding clinics to teach owners of working and pleasure horses. It’s not necessary to be enthusiastic about horses to fall under the spell of its treatment of their beauty, intelligence and ability to interact comfortably with their human companions.

Watching Buck’s methods for changing horses from animals with free will into companions and servants without the brutal traditional “breaking in” inflicted on horses during the millennia since that relationship began, is a revelation and a delight. So are the passages showing Buck’s family supporting his passion for what he does so well.

An extended sequence involves reality seldom seen on screen. Explaining fundamental faults in her horse husbandry while paramedics treat her husband, whom a potentially-useful but intractable horse badly handled since birth has savaged, Buck gently reduces its owner to ashamed tears.

Horses are big, quick animals with many behaviours like humans’. Director Cindy Meehl’s film looks honestly and affectionately at one man’s lifetime of improving their relationship with people and vice versa.

At Greater Union