Laghat
Drama • 2025 • 1h 45m
Laghat – Un Sogno Impossibile
This movie was screened on Torino Film Festival 2025
The film tells the story of Andrea, a 21-year-old who has abandoned his career as a jockey and now works with his father, an antique dealer involved in shady business. A chance encounter with Tony — an old trainer who still believes in him — rekindles Andrea’s desire to return to the track. But the only horse available to him is Laghat: a talented thoroughbred who is severely impaired in his sight. Against all odds, Andrea decides to try: a challenge begins for both of them, one that is as human as it is athletic. Through a relationship built on trust, listening, setbacks, and redemption, Andrea embarks on a journey of personal growth, searching for his own identity.
Laghat was an English thoroughbred who, as a foal, was struck by an eye disease (a fungal infection) that left him practically blind — blind in one eye, and with almost no vision in the other. Despite this severe handicap — which for many would have marked the end of any possible racing career — Laghat managed to compete, becoming an extraordinary case: over the course of his athletic career he ran approximately 123 races, winning 26 of them. After retiring from racing (2015), the horse survived and continued to live in his paddock; his story was told in a book for adults and children, and now in a film.
Force is never what it seems.
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
What stands out in Laghat is not the spectacle of horse racing, but the depth of its alternative gaze. Laghat is not “normal”: he is a horse who does not fully see. And yet — as in the true story that inspired the film — he manages to run, to win, to be “exceptional.”
Just like Laghat, Andrea is also an unusual young man: he left racing behind and slipped into a grey environment (his father’s antique shop, the shadows of illicit dealings), which nonetheless affords him a nice car and a certain economic comfort. His return to the track is not a promise of glory, but an existential rebirth. The combination — a young idealism broken alongside a horse “discarded” by the norm — becomes the substance of a story about the possibility of reshaping roles, imaginaries, and social expectations.
Laghat challenges the order of efficiency, normativity, and “perfect” performance.
The scenic action — racing, training, the track — becomes a symbol of communion. It is not speed or victory that matters, but the ability to build a shared language: Andrea and Laghat learn to communicate through rhythm, touch, and trust. In this process, disability is not an obstacle to be hidden or “normalized,” but a condition that requires time, attention, and respect — and that reveals a different sense of performance: no longer domination and conquest, but care.
Behind the sporting narrative loom conflicts of an anthropological and social nature: Andrea lives in the shadow of an authoritarian and ambiguous father and alongside a brother who is coarse and violent. His encounter with Giulia, a groom at the stable — autonomous, strong, tough, and independent — becomes an emotional anchor for him.
The relationship with Tony — the former trainer — represents a bridge between the past and a possible authentic alternative, but it offers no certainties: it is a difficult, fragile opportunity that can lead to rebirth only through sacrifice, trust, and inner transformation.
Though rooted in a true story — that of a truly blind horse capable of winning major races — LAGHAT does not seem to aim for documentary realism, but for existential drama: sport becomes an inner battlefield, the race a rite of passage, and the jockey-horse duo the protagonists of a metaphorical transformation.
It is not the great victory that matters, but the very possibility of running: the willingness to try, to trust, to believe in the “impossible.” In this sense, the film takes the shape of a contemporary allegory of fragility, marginalization, and the hidden beauty of anomaly — of the value of what is not perfect: talent.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen