Writer and Director: Lucy D’Cruz
This well-meaning and occasionally inspiring documentary about a long rider (a person who travels extensive distances on horseback) might have worked better as a long short rather than a 95-minute feature. The long rider in question, Hugh MacDermott, is still a young man, and despite his epic journey around Argentina on his horse Pancho, director Lucy D’Cruz’s film is short on details about the expedition itself. Instead, The Long Quiet is more concerned with MacDermott’s personal journey. As the rider says himself, the trek was a “life-maker”.
When MacDermott and his elder brother were very young in Ireland and England, their mother would read them Tschiffely’s Ride, an autobiographical book by Aimé Tschiffely, a long rider who travelled from Buenos Aires to New York in the 1920s. The trek of 10,000 miles took him and his two horses, Mancha and Gato, nearly three years. Hugh and Sam were enthralled with the story, and there’s a cute photo of them as boys looking like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the back of a horse.
In the early 2000s, after being one of the naughtiest and brightest boys at school, 19-year-old Hugh finds himself in Argentina. With dashed dreams of being an actor and then an equestrian stuntman, he’s in South America to work on a horse ranch. His apprenticeship isn’t quite what he expected, and so he buys a horse and decides to ride through the country, half in the footsteps of his childhood hero. MacDermott isn’t trying to recreate Tschiffely’s grand trek; instead, he explores the upper reaches of the Andes.
Of course, there was no film crew to capture MacDermott and Pancho on their journey into the wilderness, and so, with the help of some reconstructions with Hugh back on his horse, the story is narrated to us. There are some interviews, too, with men he met on the way, older men who act as father-figures for MacDermott, who is estranged from his own father. Rather than the long ride itself and the spiritual peace – the long quiet of the title – D’Cruz is keener to show us the reasons why her subject felt compelled to undertake such a lonely adventure.
However, these reasons come late in the film, and it would be a disservice to reveal them here, although one of them seems a little overplayed in today’s more accepting climate. The focus on the latter motive perhaps takes us too far from the journey itself, a journey that has already been added to the history books. There are some stunning shots of MacDermott standing on his horse surveying the verdant landscape, while CuChullaine O’Reilly, the Founding Member of The Long Riders’ Guild, adds drama with his hyperbolic commentary.
But once MacDermott’s journey is completed, The Long Quiet take its time to finish its own journey. And his feat is almost overshadowed.
The Long Quiet is screening at the London Breeze Festival 2025.
