Icelandic movie Of Horses and Men has picked up the Golden Iris Award for best film at the Brussels Film Festival in Belgium. The Benedikt Erlingsson-directed movie centres on Icelandic horses, and the men and women who live and work alongside them, through the horses’ perspective. Love, death and tragedy are all interlaced with each other on what some movie experts have described as one of the most dramatic films of the year. The movie involves a bizarre love story in which Solveig and Kolbeinn love each other; however, Kolbeinn is also in love with his mare, Grana, while Grana is in love with the stallion, Brunn. With spring approaching, the community is anticipating a tragic ending to the plot. Erlingsson, who wrote and directed the movie, is among Iceland’s most renowned theatre directors, and has won numerous awards over the years. Over the past 10 years, almost all of his productions have been played at theatres for extended periods and have been sell outs. The director, who picked up 10,000 euros along with the award, explained that he came up with the idea for Of Horses and Men because he wanted to portray the beauty of the relationship between man and beast as well as to write something that would be regarded as “peculiar and ludicrous”. He went on to say that since a young age he had ridden horses and has always been fascinated by them, adding that the relationship between horses and humans has always been dear to him.