A Menina: E O Cavalo 1983

Nevertheless, modern audiences often recoil. The film has rarely been screened publicly in Brazil since the 1990s and is more frequently discussed in academic texts on transgressive cinema than viewed. It exists in a gray zone—alongside works like Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) or Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001)—that demand a conversation about where art ends and violation begins. Visually, Capovilla employs a stark, sun-drenched palette. Cinematographer Dib Lutfi shoots in long, unbroken takes, often from a low angle that elevates the horse to monumental proportions. The girl is frequently framed in extreme close-up—her hands, her bare feet, the back of her neck—while the horse is shown whole. This creates a jarring power dynamic: the human is fragmented, the animal is whole. The editing is glacial, forcing the viewer to sit with each gesture until comfort dissolves into unease.

The film’s most controversial and unforgettable sequence occurs when the girl, in a moment of solitary exploration, begins to mimic sexual acts with the horse. She rubs herself against its leg, clutches its torso, and eventually positions herself beneath the animal in a simulation of coitus. The horse, crucially, does not respond aggressively or sexually; it stands bewildered, a monumental presence bearing witness to a human child’s precocious, unguided exploration of desire. The camera holds these shots with a disquieting, anthropological stillness. There is no music to guide emotion—only the sounds of wind, breathing, and the occasional snort of the horse. A Menina E O Cavalo 1983

The girl does not ride the horse in any conventional sense. Instead, she engages in a series of intimate, tactile rituals: she strokes its flanks, presses her body against its warmth, whispers (inaudibly) into its ear. She grooms it obsessively, braiding its mane with wildflowers. The horse, for its part, is depicted as a creature of immense patience and latent power—sometimes docile, other times skittish. Nevertheless, modern audiences often recoil

Sound design is equally radical. There is no score. The natural sounds—wind rustling dry grass, the heavy breath of the horse, the soft friction of skin against hide—are amplified to near-ASMR intensity, making the viewer feel like a voyeur hiding in the bushes. A Menina e o Cavalo is not a film for easy consumption. It is a cinematic Rorschach test: some will see a tender, tragic poem about solitude and the animal self; others will see a deeply troubling document of a child placed in an untenable symbolic position. What is undeniable is its power. Capovilla created a work that burrows under the skin, raising uncomfortable questions about the nature of desire, the limits of childhood, and the ways cinema can (or should) depict the forbidden. Visually, Capovilla employs a stark, sun-drenched palette

In the end, the horse and the girl remain locked in their silent dance—a haunting, beautiful, and profoundly unsettling image of innocence wrestling with a body it does not yet understand. For those who seek cinema that disturbs the sleep of the comfortable, A Menina e o Cavalo remains an essential, if nearly unwatchable, masterpiece.