To ensure a free life for the horses, their manes are cut off and they are branded

Under the banner of this caption, the sequence opens: a slow motion, three men try to brutally restrain a horse with dissonant and sinister background music.

In a bar as they play dominoes, some talk about the French who, in the Napoleonic period, had gone to conquer and subjugate them, they, Spaniards, considered "shit idiots..."

Turning to Antoine, they ask him if this is still the case, he having moved to Galicia from France with his wife to devote himself to the project of a lifetime, that of organically cultivating the land and renovating dilapidated houses to enable the repopulation of the place.

A retrogressive and culturally closed place, where some inhabitants intend to give up their land to wind power companies, while the French couple intends to reclaim their relationship with the land.

A continuous verbal instigation against "the little Frenchman," a big, imposing, silent, respectful big man who initially does not yield to provocation.

A continuous challenge that becomes increasingly violent and intrusive, produced by the Anta brothers, which Antoine hopes to curb and denounce by filming with his small camera.

Nature, markets, and the tranquility of the fields alternate with the constant challenges, an unstoppable alternation of moments of serenity and discomfort.

When Antoine and Olga find the entire tomato crop compromised, they discover that two lead batteries have been placed in the well, polluting the water and destroying a year's work.

A relentless crescendo of tension and suspicion.

A land of discord for the French couple where the locals have nothing to lose, while they may lose everything.

They fear for their lives and the latest attack they suffered leads Antoine to talk to the two brothers even though Xan decides everything and Loren is simply his pawn.

As the two delude themselves that with the money from the wind turbines they will be able to change their lives Antoine realizes the impossibility of communicating with them and tries to obtain justice through legality.

Something irreversible, foreboding, probably inevitable will happen, but the story will continue on the ground of the consecration of expectation, perseverance, love, justice, search, response, transformation.

A backward world, branded by ignorance with its unreflected reasons struggling with a world that tends to reclaim a new contact with nature and with a more intimate meaning about choices.

Like the beasts, the title says, but who are the beasts?

The "aloitadores" who capture and tame wild horses with their bare hands?

The brothers Xan and Loren who use prevarication and violence?

Olga and Antoine who want to return to the origins of peasant life?

The wind companies speculating on poverty to buy cheap land?

What beasts are free and untamed horses compared to mane-deprived and branded ones?

In the mountains of Galicia, amid unspoiled nature already stand many wind turbines waiting to breed to the detriment of the countryside and crops.

As development knocks on the door of peasant homes, Sorogoyen turns up the heat on the pressure that grows and mounts unstoppably.

Captivity gives birth to aggression and passes it down indelibly branding the lives of Xan and Loran and in wanting to subject the other to their will, perpetuates and condemns their own submission to it.

A film of exemplary technical-directorial-interpretive power.

One hundred and thirty-seven tense, high-emotional minutes with implications of continuous referral to the core: raw, dry and yet striking.

Conceptually focused on the theme of incommunicability and human savagery, the relationship with prejudice and the stranger, the value of choice and justice, and the paradigm of voluntary servitude.

A clash of cultures without catharsis, where eros does not generate and thanatos, while music sounds sinister, suffocates the space of nature and the time of life.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice