November 1999. 67-year-old Trond lives in new-found desolation, looking forward to New Year’s Eve 2000 alone. He discovers he has a neighbor, a man he knew in 1948. The summer Trond turned 15. The summer Trond’s father prepared him to shoulder his forthcoming betrayal and disappearance. The summer Trond grew up and met a woman he yearned for. The woman Trond’s father was preparing to spend his life with.

Direction: Hans Petter Moland

Script: Hans Petter Moland

Production: Håkon Øverås

Co-Production: Turid Øversveen

Cinematography: Rasmus Videbæk, Thomas Hardmeier

Editing: Nicolaj Monberg, Jens Christian Fodstad

Production Design: Jørgen Stangebye Larsen

Costume Design: Anne Pedersen

Make-Up: Egle Mikalauskaite

Sound: Gisle Tveito

Original Score: Kaspar Kaae

Visual Effects: Peter Hjorth

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Danica Curcic, Jon Ranes, Tobias Santelmann, Bjørn Floberg

Original Title: UT OG STJÆLE HESTER

Original Language: Norwegian

Film Production Countries: Norway, Denmark, Sweden

Statement of the Director/s
When I was first asked to get involved with OUT STEALING HORSES in 2004 I didn't want to do it. It was simply too painful.
I had left home when I was 16 and moved to the US, in many ways to get away from where I came from. I had just been asked to take over the family farm, but I resisted. Leaving Norway was also an attempt to put some distance between myself and my father. Our farm was a beautiful, but desolate place. To get to the main road we travelled three kilometres on a private dirt track. It wasn't a life of hardship I escaped, but a life of desolation. And this is what I met when I opened OUT STEALING HORSES. The same landscape, the inner turmoil of a 15-year-old boy, with a relationship to his father that was full of paradoxes.
Age is a funny thing. I've stopped long ago running away from who I was - and who I am. It is a futile exercise.
When I was asked again a few years ago to look at OUT STEALING HORSES it was a whole different experience.
The poetic qualities of the prose, the rich descriptions of nature, and the inner turmoil of the young boy, were all of a sudden rich and intimate depictions of a life that I knew.
I have always told rather serious tales, even when they 've been filled with humour, or told with a light touch. The last ten years I’ve tried to make people laugh even when the tragedy was apparent. It has given me a chance to describe pain without letting the pain become painful.
OUT STEALING HORSES is no comedy, but the story has a tenderness in the telling that is forgiving of human nature. There is no melodrama in the story. Just lives full of drama, of tragic mistakes that alter lives. Jon's father's cowardice breaks his spirit. Trond's father, on the other hand, has the courage to choose love, but breaks a family and a young son's heart.
Film is a fantastically musical, poetic medium at its best. It is devastatingly banal at its worst. The concreteness of film can rob the most magical moment of its poetic strength. But this story is unique. The characters move in a world unhinged from the noise of the outside world. Their dilemmas and conflicts are void of a world that distracts. Instead they're surrounded – and occasionally engulfed – by nature. It's an overwhelming, and sometimes frightening nature. Not because it's harsh, but because it's vast, persistent and at times oppressing.
The novel is filmic in its movements, its rhythm and structure, and the reason I think it has the potential to make a great film. What is untold, insinuated, or alluded to, gives the story great mystery, a story where a whole life is unfolded through interwoven fragments. We learn what Trond's choices have done to him, but even more so, we learn how his father's choice, when Trond was 15, has reverberated in Trond throughout his life.
Old Trond fails miserably at the task of being a loner. He's certainly no poster boy for Freudian therapy, but somehow he inadvertently begins to heal, in spite of his neurotic resistance.
The healing he experiences is not through therapy.
But when he re-engages with life, and with people, he also allows his past to enter his existence.
I feel that I know the inner landscape he travels. It's a world many men inhabit. I count myself among them. Not with pride, but as a fact. But just as Trond, I feel somehow liberated from the stifling limitations of a tumultuous past. This liberation fills me with joy and with a great desire to tell this story.

Biography of the Director/s
Hans Petter Moland is both a writer and director for OUT STEALING HORSES. Hans Petter directed his first feature film in 1993.
Three of his films were selected for the competition programme at the Berlin International Film Festival, THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (2004), A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (2010), and IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (2014). His films have received awards and nominations in Berlin, San Sebastian and Karlovy Vary, among others.

Filmography of the Director/s
2019 - OUT STEALING HORSES
2019 - COLD PURSUIT
2016 - CONSPIRACY OF FAITH
2014 - IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE
2010 - A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN
2004 - THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
2000 - ABERDEEN
1995 - ZERO KELVIN

Awards Won
Silver Berlin Bear for an "Outstanding Artistic Contribution" Berlinale 2019.

Production Company:
4 1/2 Film AS
Håkon Øverås
Storgata 5
Oslo, 0155, Norway
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +47 90 60 30 80
Website: http://fireogenhalv.no/

World Sales:
Trust Nordisk Aps
Susan Wendt
Filmbyen 22
Hvidovre, 2650, Denmark
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +45 29 74 62 06
Website: http://www.trustnordisk.com/