They Are Killing the Horse (1979): A Film They Tried to Bury
by Saad Khan
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Title: They Are Killing the Horse (also circulated under the title Noori)
Year: 1979
Country: Pakistan
Format: Black-and-white short film / docudrama
Director: Mushtaq Gazdar
Writer: Saeeda Gazdar
Survival: Circulates primarily via VHS-derived digital copies
Context: Made in the aftermath of a military takeover; later suppressed during the authoritarian moral order that followed
They Are Killing the Horse is a short black-and-white film from Pakistan, made at the end of the 1970s. It follows a young woman named Noori (Light) as she breaks down, and it shows what people do to her while calling it help.
Noori lives in a world that keeps closing in. She is watched. She is judged. She is not allowed a clean way to want anything.
So she builds a private method.
She sits with a candle and stares into the flame. She tries to reach someone through it. She calls it a retreat. It is survival.
In her mind, a young man comes toward her on a horse.
That image returns again and again. It is not romance. It is escape. It is the thought that someone could cut through the rules and pull her out. A dream many people carry under repression.
The film moves between her inner life and the outside world. A clinic. A street. A college. A bus. Rooms where adults speak about her as if she is not there.
At college she becomes visible. That is where the pressure spikes. A glance becomes a threat. A feeling becomes a crime. The mind fills the gaps. The horseman comes back. Sometimes the horse becomes a motorbike. Same promise. A fast exit.
But in her real life, there is no exit.
When I first encountered this film as a child, it was not in full form. It was either on Pakistani television or on a VHS. I do not remember which. What I do remember is that the sexual imagery was gone. The imagined escapes were cut. What remained was the confusion. The candle. The clinic. The shrines. The labels.
That was my first exposure to meditation, psychiatry, dogma, diagnosis, and pathology, all colliding in one body. Even stripped of its most intimate scenes, the film taught a lesson early. That adults explain suffering in ways that protect systems, not people.
Seen whole, the logic becomes clear.
The film treats her desire as the wound, not a side note. In the world around her, a woman’s desire is either erased or punished. If it appears, it gets renamed. Shame. Possession. Bad character. Sickness.
Then comes the procession.
A horse in the street, exhausted and sick. People circle it, treat it as sacred, then kill it.
Noori watches. Something locks into place. In her mind, the horse is the carrier of rescue. So its killing lands like a sentence. There will be no rescue here.
Noori does not get saved. She gets handled. Her family moves her from one place to another, searching for a cure. Holy men. Shrines. A psychiatrist. Rituals. People deciding what she is.
This is a time of martial rule. Punishment is public. Fear is normal. Control is not just a family habit. It is how the country is being run. Gazdar shows this through documentary footage of public flogging, cut against Noori’s cries of horror.
Later, the film was suppressed. That was predictable. It says and shows too much. A woman breaking under pressure. Religion used as a tool. Treatment turning into harm. A society choosing order over truth.
Today, the film survives as a poor VHS rip. The usual fate for work the state wanted gone.
And still, it holds.
A woman dreams of a way out, as the world around her kills the horse.
