they experienced an unforgettable adventure with wild mustangs in the USA

They have just returned from the United States where they spent a month, from the end of August to the end of September 2024, meeting the last wild mustangs of Colorado, for a documentary film that they intend to see released at the end of the year. summer 2025. And it was a very moving adventure.

Marion Fernandez and Maxence Lamoureux, former students of the French-speaking Animal Cinema Training Institute of Ménigoute (Iffcam) where they met, a couple in life, have been established for three years in Ménigoutais, on the borders of Vienne and the Deux-Sèvres, in Benassay (Vienne), a stone’s throw from Les Forges.

“I felt responsible for her”

The association with the “chironesque” name of these thirty-year-old animal filmmakers, Les Films du granit, once based in Saint-Loup-Lamairé, is now attached to the Maison des cultures de pays in Parthenay.

They have already made two documentaries together but this third project is emotionally incommensurable.

At the genesis, there was already a mustang. We go back to Marion’s childhood, lulled by the animated film Spirit, the stallion of the plains. “I have been a rider since the age of 3 and we have two horses… It’s true that there is a liability”, smiles the director.

So neither one, nor two, during the presentation in the USA of the film on the common cranes by Maxence in 2018, they went to meet these famous wild mustangs, inseparable from the myth of Western America.

Juliet in Colorado… and Romeo in Gâtine

“I only saw the first herd because I was in tears,” remembers Marion. She will not have finished being moved because it is there that she will come across a filly so recently arrived in her herd that Marion will have the immense privilege of choosing a name for her, as is the local custom when one is the first human to lay eyes on one of these horses.

“She had the same palomino coat as my horse, Romeo. So, naturally, it was Juliette. It’s strange how aware I was that I was experiencing a very special moment. To top it all off, she started doing somersaults. D“Irrationally, instantly, I felt responsible for her,” says Marion.

Then the galloping life resumed its course in France, between projects. But Juliette was always on her French “godmother”’s mind. Above all, Marion had made a promise to herself that one day she would see this filly in her wild state again. So, like Jack London’s irresistible call to the forest, this project returned in the summer of 2024.

Six years later, the flow of emotion has risen a notch. The couple found the famous mare who had become a mother and adopted into a herd by an American woman who undertook to reunite this family of horses.

“To manage these wild horse populations, the federal state office (BLM) in charge of public lands carries out large captures, a method contested by mustang protectors because it is often a source of injuries and trauma. The horses are then parked and put up for adoption; only a few are returned to the wild in the reserve from which they came. Juliette, thus captured in 2021, is now deprived of her wild life,” Maxence camp.

The capture campaign has increased significantly since 2021 in the United States, with the federal government considering wild mustangs too numerous and “too impactful” on the environment, whereas in 1970 the breed was still in danger of extinction. .

By weaving Juliette’s destiny into a film, Marion wants to assert more generally that “this says a lot about our relationship with the wild world, the way we manage it and the place we give it.”

“No place for wildlife”

We feel that the dog Buck’s dream of returning to his freedom with Jack London is emerging here. “I would love it so much for her but I’m pessimistic about it. The fundamental question is the absence of space for wild life in the face of lobbies, in this case that of meat. This is not just a criticism of the American system, this pattern is also present in France. devise Marion Fernandez.

In the meantime, the couple who shot these four-handed sequences are in the process of preparing another documentary. Much more local and in Gâtine this one, it is dedicated to the northern harrier… whose Latin name (Circus pygargus) makes in this circumstance a strange echo of a certain bald eagle, emblem of the United States.