The Gallop of Desire
● Writing
Embodied Instincts: Sensual Cinema and Artistic Identity
Ann Oren’s feature debut – an Israeli artist based in Berlin – takes us on an intensely sensual, visually and sonically saturated journey. Piaffe, shown in the main competition at the 2023 mBank New Horizons Film Festival, is a story of bodily transformation and artistic instincts at the service of self-knowledge, embodied in a trembling, almost tactile experience.
In her first full-length film, made with a modest budget, Oren continues her aesthetic explorations, remaining true to the mysterious and surreal landscapes of her earlier works. Piaffe extends her 2020 short film and installation Passage, where she portrayed the creative journey of a non-binary sound artist whose body and work nearly become one. The theme of imitation and the blurring of boundaries between creator and creation has been central to Oren’s own artistic practice. This time, she invites into her cinematic world human, animal, and plant figures with ambiguous, fluid identities – sexual, gendered, and species-bound. Through these hybrids, we are challenged not only to look at horses differently, but also to critically examine the issues of normativity and the patriarchal paradigms that underpin it.
Oren’s remarkably considered visual language immerses us in a story brimming with color, one that feels as though it hails from another era, yet offers a contemporary and fresh perspective. Piaffe is a multi-sensory journey where body horror and new extremity meet romance; David Cronenberg gazes at Maya Deren, and in the background, we can discern the aesthetics of Amalia Ulman and the spirit of Catherine Breillat, particularly her Romance (also shown at the 2023 mBank New Horizons Film Festival in the Avec Plaisir section). While all these inspirations are delightful to trace, Oren finds a bold new voice in her debut.
The Politics of Looking, Sound, and Materiality
The film’s opening shot immediately invites us into the act of voyeurism – we see two openings of an object resembling a binocular, a device meant specifically for watching others. From the start, it feels as if we are both being watched and are ourselves watching, becoming part of this voyeuristic game. We are drawn into it, much like the mysterious peepshow space of Warsaw’s photoplasticon – the carousel of secret glances, gestures, and rendezvous, shaped like a horseshoe. This suggestive opening introduces us to the world of what the gaze may bring – a perspective of domination, of desiring and desired figures, of dominance and submission, a dynamic of control, and the creation of illusion. It also poses the subversive question of the viewer’s place in this exchange of glances, consciously referencing cinema history and the materiality of film itself.
The main character of this world is Eva (played by Mexican actress Simone Bucio), a woman living in Berlin who shyly casts fleeting glances and silently watches over the aforementioned photoplasticon. It displays grotesquely oversized slides of ferns at various stages of blooming. The space itself exists somewhere between a 19th-century cabinet of curiosities and a laboratory for studying plant life and observing its intricate biology. However, the photoplasticon is primarily an early film device built around a circular wooden structure. It allows multiple viewers to peer through a pair of lenses at a line of slides, which, when rotated, create the illusion of motion – though still silent – and a sense of three-dimensionality.
It is within this ASMR-like soundscape of contrasting silences and sounds that we immerse ourselves alongside Eva. She is to replace her non-binary twin sister Zara – played by performer Simon(a) Jaikiriuma Paetau, who embodies a magical mix of wild animality and burlesque glamour – in the role of sound imitator. Eva's task is to provide sound for an advertisement for Equily, a mood stabilizer with dangerous side effects, in which the central motif is the gallop of a horse.
Materiality and the Cinematic Body
In the silent, hypnotically trance-like image of an elegant woman riding a horse in place lies the core of the film. This challenging and ambitious step illustrates the film's title. The term 'piaffe', derived from the era of mounted battles, refers to the act of keeping the animal in a constant state of readiness for movement. This ambitious choreography resembles a dance in place. The constant repetition of this motion subtly echoes Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking 1878 experiment The Horse in Motion. Muybridge's chronophotographic study, designed to settle a dispute about whether a horse's hooves ever leave the ground during a gallop, became a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. His invention of the zoopraxiscope, which projected a series of photographs in quick succession, made visible what had previously been imperceptible to the human eye.
This attention to early cinematic apparatuses—like the photoplasticon, Muybridge’s chronophotography, and analog film stock—not only recalls the birth of cinema, but places Piaffe within a lineage of films that interrogate the material conditions of image-making. In doing so, Oren echoes what Laura Mulvey describes as “delayed cinema”: a mode of filmmaking that slows down perception and foregrounds the texture of the image itself. Here, the grain of the 16mm film and the tactile rhythm of movement do not merely serve narrative, but become sensory events in their own right, inviting the viewer to feel the body of the film as much as to watch it.
Ann Oren’s film is deeply rooted in the history of cinema and conscious of its own materiality, symbolized by the almost archetypal cinematic figure of the horse, in which its fascination slumbers. The film doesn't simply play with the repetition of the animal’s movement or the hypnotic observation of it, though it skillfully manipulates the viewer’s belief that what they are seeing on screen is real, using sound imitation as a key tool. Piaffe expands the elemental cinematic realms of image and sound, bringing touch into the forefront as another important sense. The choice of Kodak 16mm film to tell a story about the magic and deception inherent in sound enhances its sensuous quality, adding an organic element to the film’s alchemical character.
The visual language of Piaffe is saturated with motifs of horseback riding and the symbolism of the horseshoe, consistently mirrored in the set design. The extraordinary locations – Berlin’s techno clubs, its summer streets, and spectacular architectural sites such as the Hufeisensiedlung estate in Britz or the revolving arc of the photoplasticon – invite the viewer to enjoy deciphering patterns and repetitions. These elements become part of Carlos Vasquez’s camera choreography, offering a rich metonymy that enhances the film's visual language.
Thanks to its materiality, the film shifts the boundaries of sensation, compelling us not only to be looked at but also to be physically experienced. The thoughtfully composed, grainy shots, the use of symbolic colors, and the almost tingling sound design imbue the film's image with corporeality, as though it seduces us with touch and desires to be touched in return. By revealing Eva’s creative process and the technical aspects of her work, Oren activates the viewer’s imagination and its power, prompting a confrontation with one’s own corporeality. Through a mise-en-scène saturated with perverse imagination, Oren crafts a mysterious and hypnotic landscape that stimulates and liberates the senses.
The film's intense color palette is built around a red-blue dichotomy. Red and navy blue are the two primary colors, each corresponding to the smallest and greatest dispersion of light in a lens, positioned – like the twin protagonists – at opposite poles.Both deeply symbolic and saturated hues engage in dialogue, evoking the duality of the sisters, their interdependence, and the way they shape each other. Like two halves of a magical pill, they reflect a dynamic of mutual dominance. Dressed in deep blue, Eva visits Zara in the pathologically blue-toned hospital space. As she begins to take on her sister’s role, she gradually acquires red attributes, as if her growing strength were draining Zara’s. Zara’s presence is marked by spills of red light when she appears in Eva’s mind but remains absent from the frame. Red gradually begins to materialize everywhere, emerging as a polar opposite to the blue Eva once wore. These intense hues also appear in intercut sequences using discarded or overexposed film stock, heightening the tension and constantly reminding us of the sensuality of the cinematic body.
Becoming Animal: Rhythm, Desire, and Queer Kinship
The film is built on unstable and fluid categories, finding non-binary potential in the search for identity, sexuality, creativity, and strength. Through the exploration of cinematic corporeality, it delves into the physicality of the main character. Forced to assume her twin sister’s role, Eva confronts not only the film material but, above all, her own body. The attempt to capture the right sounds becomes, in itself, a celebration of the magic of cinema and the imitation of reality through manipulative tricks. What matters is not what we hear, but whether what we hear aligns with what we see. After her first attempts, Eva fails in this regard – she cannot achieve the perfect rhythm between image and sound. The director of the commercial (played by ironically exaggerated video artist Bjørn Melhus) criticizes the mechanical effect she presented, suggesting that she should experience life more – "look at people and animals." This, however, becomes an impulse for Eva to immerse herself deeper into the intricate web of sound. Following this advice, Eva begins to observe the world more closely, diligently tracking the habits and behavior of horses, collecting inspiration, and in this way building a profound intimacy between herself and the animal.
The scene of the horse’s piaffe, endlessly replayed by Eva, leads her into obsession and a trance-like state as she stubbornly searches for the right sounds. What begins as a timid play with materiality quickly transforms into a physical struggle for Eva, pushing the boundaries of her own body. The objects used to imitate the sounds are scattered on the floor of Zara’s studio, arranged like peculiar props in a theatrical ritual. The longer Eva engages with her task, the more the boundary between the apartment and the studio dissolves, and the space starts to resemble a chaotic stable.
Eva touches many of the objects, exploring and experiencing them as she searches for the sounds of hooves, reins, and the horse’s neigh. She uses her own body as a conduit for sound: playing with coconut halves, boxing gloves, and slipping her hands and feet into boots. She rubs them on straw, strokes a shiny tail, and bites a chain that cuts into her skin, all while mimicking the horse’s breath.
She begins to share its breath, as if she and the horse are connected organisms. Eva’s touch, through sound, triggers the animal’s movement, and her breath becomes its neigh. Much like in Passage, the boundary between Eva and the horse starts to dangerously blur, and the protagonist seems to lose her sense of corporeality, identifying more with the animal than with herself.
As the animal invades Eva’s spirit, a violent change also takes place in her own body. She discovers that, like an extension of her spine, a horse’s tail begins to grow from her. Initially resembling a surreal mutation, like the budding of a flower, it slowly transforms into a thick, dark mane. It shines like her own hair, resembling a BDSM prop that Eva has grown on her skin.
In many of the shots, we see her furtive glance at herself in the mirrors, as if the shifting reflections were intended to prove her existence. But can a mutable corporeality truly be confirmed by mere reflection? Interwoven with this exploration is the complex and ambiguous relationship between the sisters. When, as a result of the endless repetition of similar actions, Zara experiences a psychotic episode of dissociation, she becomes Eva’s guide in an intimate process of transformation. She takes on the role of Eva’s alter-ego, which may be either a product of her imagination or a byproduct of her creative process.
Watching the process of Eva’s animalization—or her acquisition of animal instincts—brings to mind Marion Laval-Jeantet’s interspecies project May the Horse Live in Me, in which the artist, for a time, administered small doses of horse plasma. Describing the experience of interspecies blood transfusion, the artist spoke of a sensation of being “outside of humanity. I was no longer in my usual body. I was hyper-strong, hypersensitive, hyper-nervous, and very shy. I had all the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep, and I felt a little like a horse.” In the performance concluding her project, Marion wore stilts with hooves, walking alongside her horse-donor in a “ritual of communication.” The fusion of bioart and extreme body art, raising questions of interspecies sisterhood and the true boundaries between species, sought to create a hybrid body—a union of human and animal.
In Piaffe, artistic and erotic symbolism are deliberately entangled, revealing a continuum between bodily transformation, sexual liberation, and animalistic instinct. The film positions Eva’s physical mutation not as a grotesque deviation, but as a catalyst for exploring repressed ambiguity and an untapped reservoir of energy. Her metamorphosis initiates a shift from aesthetic engagement with the horse to an embodied enactment of sexual agency. This transition draws on the psychological codes of equestrian training, where control, submission, and rhythm are already heavily charged with symbolic meaning.
The moment Eva confidently lets her newly grown tail spill from her trousers, she resembles a dressage rider in full command, and the horse emerges as a figure saturated with erotic and phallic connotations. Through Eva, the viewer enters a liminal space of fluid identity, where the human blends with the animal and the boundaries of nature, gender, and subjectivity begin to dissolve. The film investigates the unstable thresholds between dominance and surrender, desire and discipline, madness and pleasure.
As Eva's transformation intensifies, the choreography of piaffe—its repetitive, in-place movement—becomes entangled with the physicality of techno dancing. She perceives an affinity between the horse’s constrained motion and the mechanical, ecstatic rhythm of club dancers. Now that the body has become the primary medium for her creative and identity-driven inquiry, Eva seeks new modes of expression. This leads her to a techno club, where a telling gesture—crushing a shot glass in her hand—marks a shift toward self-determined agency.
According to the film’s director, the club is not merely a space of hedonism but a meditative zone where Eva can attune to her instincts. Immersed in the pulsing beat, she reenacts the choreography of piaffe. Her black shoes and girlish white socks transform her legs into a visual echo of horse hooves—a metaphor reinforced through parallel editing. This merging of human and animal movement further blurs ontological boundaries, emphasizing how pleasure itself becomes an exercise in control. Eva’s exploration of desire becomes a negotiation between instinct and restraint, a choreography of power that foregrounds embodiment as a site of transformation.
The Senses Unbound: Pleasure, Power, and the Body in Flux
Eva’s search for sexual fulfillment complements her journey toward self-discovery. The sexual potential of her mutation is unlocked through her encounter with Novak (Sebastian Rudolph), a mysterious botanist and fetishist whom she meets at a photoplasticon.
A fluid, undefined eroticism begins to unfold between them. In the botanical garden, Eva seduces Novak with an extravagantly intimate gesture—offering him a rose the color of her carmine lips, just moments after retrieving it from a white vase shaped like a swan. Later, that same rose becomes a gag—and, for the first and only time, a means of penetration. The scene takes on the character of a BDSM-inflected rose ceremony, drenched in retro aesthetics and heightened by the nostalgic crackle of a vinyl record playing Natasza Zylska’s voice: Kochany, kochany, lecą z drzewa, jak dawniej, kasztany.
Eva’s connection with Novak is not driven by emotional longing, but by a desire to explore new forms and thresholds of sensuality. She is intrigued by him because he satisfies her urge to be tamed, trained, or even objectified. Fascinated by the sensual and unsettling strangeness of her bodily mutation, Novak becomes a guide in her transformation, entering a dynamic of dominance that mirrors the logic of horse training. Eva’s tail—once a symbol of empowerment—also becomes an instrument of control, a tool in a sexual game that highlights the shifting balance of power between them. Who is in control, and who is truly submissive?
The film plays with the mechanics of domination, showing that submission can be intentional and active. In the BDSM practices it draws upon, it is often the submissive partner who sets the terms of power exchange, making submission a form of control. Eva’s journey involves identifying and navigating these structures of power. She doesn’t merely submit—she experiments with submission. The tension of that play is expressed through her body: in her movements, in the sounds she produces, in the choreography of her desire.
Their shared animalistic energy is reflected in how they move together—like rider and ridden in a prolonged act of foreplay—finding a rhythm echoed in the sound of Eva’s heels, rising and falling like hooves, as she reaches sexual release. It is only when she dares to follow her own internal rhythm that she achieves the desired effect for the Equili commercial—and finally discovers her own piaffe.
Though the communication between the characters occurs almost entirely in a non-verbal, animalistic, and intuitive manner, Novak explains in detail to Eva the sexuality of ferns, which he studies scientifically. His explanation of their hermaphroditic nature and sexual fluidity becomes a crucial point of reference in Eva’s exploration of sexual tension. Ferns not only visually parallel the bent posture associated with horseback riding but their reproductive cycle mirrors the ambiguous identities of the protagonists. With both male and female organs, ferns reproduce through self-fertilization, much like Eva, who embodies more than one gender. Both she and Zara resist the need for a fixed identity, transcending the binary limitations that society often imposes.
In the transgressive fluidity of gender and sexuality in Piaffe, there lies both creative potential and a liberating force. The movement through liminal spaces also extends to the boundaries of species. Eva, with a horse's tail suddenly sprouting from her body, becomes a hybrid balancing between the feminine, masculine, human, and animal. With grace, she evokes the image of a contemporary centaurid—a female form of the centaur less often depicted in ancient art.
In Piaffe, Ann Oren constructs a compelling metaphor for both artistic creation and sexual transformation. She does so with not only profound artistic sensitivity, but also a sense of care, crafting characters that are deliberately elusive and resistant to stable interpretation. Through her surreal and intimate gaze, and by weaving in BDSM symbolism, she liberates a kind of retro-kink passion that pulses beneath the film’s tactile surface.
Oren lyrically explores the poetics of these transitional phases of diversity, mutation, and search for the unnameable. The artist dismantles the basic, fixed categories in which we navigate life, suggesting that they need not be defined. Only when we escape these categories do we realize how oppressive they were. Subtly but unmistakably, Oren uncovers the queer strength inherent in change and celebrates the pleasure of evolving gradually, like a fern.
The film’s queerness is rooted in its exploration of interspecies transformation and the potential it unlocks—blurring the lines between human and animal, body and sound, dominance and submission. Oren’s vision resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of identity as rhizomatic: nonlinear, branching, and constantly reconfiguring. Piaffe rejects the logic of linear character development and instead embraces mutation, flux, and the dissolution of fixed roles. Eva’s metamorphosis—both physical and affective, bodily and psychic—is not simply an act of personal liberation, but a radical movement beyond the biopolitical constraints of gender, species, and control—toward new forms of embodiment, agency, and becoming.
Her transformation becomes a site of queer becoming: an embodied resistance to categorization, in which pleasure, power, and identity are neither fixed nor oppositional but perpetually in motion. Power here is not imposed but negotiated, with submission revealed as an active, even agentic position. In staging these shifting dynamics, Piaffe not only subverts dominant discourses around gender and sexuality—it proposes an alternative logic of the body, rooted in permeability, desire, and transformation.
Ultimately, Piaffe immerses us in a sensual, destabilizing world of fluid categories—where identity is no longer a fixed essence but an ongoing, affective choreography. This vision aligns with the queer potential of cinema itself—not as a medium of representation, but as a space of transformation, where bodies and meanings remain open, unstable, and in flux.
By embracing otherness—be it bodily, sexual, or interspecies—Eva accesses a new mode of becoming: one grounded in rhythm, resistance, and sensory agency. Eva, moving in rhythm with her own voice, demonstrates that no matter how uncertain the path may seem, true power lies in following one’s own pace—even if, for now, it is just a trot into the unknown.