the film
True Appaloosa
A British journalist, a horse breeder from New Zealand and a Kyrgyz herdsman go looking for the origins of the spotted horse. What they found is the reason this association exists.
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Where it started
In 2008 a British television crew came to Kyrgyzstan to film a series about trading, and bought a spotted horse from a Kyrgyz horse breeder, Munarbek Kuldanbaev. The horse went on screen and that, as far as anyone thought, was the end of it.
On the other side of the world, an Appaloosa breeder named Scott Engstrom was watching. She had spent her life with the American Appaloosa, the horse the Nez Perce bred for speed, stamina and that unmistakable spotted coat, and something about the animal on her television would not leave her alone. She wrote to Conor Woodman, the journalist who had bought it, with a question: what if the Appaloosa did not start in America at all?
The film is what happened when the two of them went to Kyrgyzstan to find out. Woodman directed and produced it, Munarbek co-produced and took them into the mountains, and the three of them spent twelve days and 3,000 kilometres tracking down the Chaar horses still living in the high pastures.
It premiered at the Sun Valley Film Festival and later aired on BBC Four under a second title, The Secret Horse: Quest for the True Appaloosa. Everything the association does now, the ranch, the breeding programme, the expeditions, the genetic work, grew out of the question the film went looking for an answer to.
- directed by
- Conor Woodman
- co-produced by
- Munarbek Kuldanbaev, now head of the Chaar Appaloosa Foundation
- with
- Scott Engstrom, Appaloosa breeder, New Zealand
- also released as
- The Secret Horse: Quest for the True Appaloosa
- premiered
- Sun Valley Film Festival
- broadcast
- BBC Four
What the DNA showed
In the film, Dr E. Gus Cothran of Texas A&M University, who analysed samples taken from 30 Kyrgyz horses in 2012, said: "About half the horses tested carried the Leopard complex gene responsible for the Appaloosa spotting pattern. Comparing that region across Kyrgyz, US and European horses suggests, though doesn't prove, that the mutation may have first arisen in Asia."
That first analysis was later withdrawn and is no longer available. The 2022 Texas A&M report on the same horses looks at their wider genetic make-up rather than the spotting.
What the film set in motion
- Chaar Ranch, in the Kyrgyz mountains, where the herd lives and foals every spring. See the ranch.
- A breeding programme working to keep the Chaar horse from disappearing into the wider Kyrgyz horse population. What is a Chaar horse?
- Genetic testing to put the film's question on a scientific footing. Read the results.
- Expeditions that take visitors into the same mountains the film was shot in. Expedition 2027.
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