The Cowboy & the Queen (Andrea Nevins, 2024): USA

Reviewed by Luca Rijkhoff. Viewed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival

The Cowboy and The Queen is a story about Californian resident Monty Roberts and his friendship with the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. The documentary is a film of Andrea Nevins, who did other documentaries before. Andrea is born in New York, but she moved to Los Angeles and that’s how she heard the story of the ‘horse whisperer’ in California.

This story isn’t in present time, but instead Monty Roberts tells his whole life story in combination with a lot of pictures, newspaper articles and video footage. He tells us about his youth, his abusive father and his long-life history with horses, especially in rodeo. From a young age, he didn’t like seeing the horses being violated or abused, like on the filmsets he worked on when he was a kid. Working with wild horses in Nevada, he finds a way to communicate with the mustang without any violence, and from then on he really starts training them. Working together with multiple people, he gets a big farm to train the horses. Eventually, Queen Elizabeth’s trainer hears of this ‘horse whisperer’ and Elizabeth invites Monty to come to England and shows his methods. From then on, a 33-year-long friendship starts. Monty even attends her funeral in 2022.

The story being told with footage and Monty’s voice instead of it being in the present, makes it outstanding for normal documentaries who follow someone’s life. It is a story with a very special friendship and past, but it focuses more on Monty, which makes it more a biography. The cinematographer made a lot of shots of the farm, surroundings and Monty being at work what shows how he lives and gives a view of his daily life. It is very special to see that he had every reason to follow his father and be just as violent as any other trainer, but instead he chose to empathize with the horse and becoming friends with the animal was a priority. This documentary stands out for me because there are a lot documentaries made about Queen Elizabeth, or ‘horse whisperers’, but this shows them both and their friendship together.

I really liked this documentary, since it shows a view of two people I both knew but never saw in this way. I grew up with horses too, I spent ten years training, riding and selling them and seeing those clips of the horses being abused, or even killed, was simply too harsh and gruesome to watch. I can imagine this is not only for me the case, but also for other animal lovers and even the full venue I watched it in at SBIFF gasped in horror watching those clips. Monty is and was always an inspiration to me and taught me that there are other ways to communicate with your horse, even if I was already never violent. I really liked seeing this side of Queen Elizabeth too, she is such a precious human being and so normal, it’s still sad she died. I would recommend this documentary to anyone who talks bad about the horse industry and show them how it can be.