Alina Orlov is a 34-year-old artist and filmmaker. She studied in the United States and Israel. Her art work international has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Germany and Azerbaijan. She is now based in Canada. Her debut short The Cavalry (2024) premiered in the Pardi di Domani section of the 77th Locarno Film Festival. The “semi-documentary” uses horses as a metaphor for abuse of authority by the Israeli police and government.

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Victoria Luxford – How did this project first come together?

Alina Orlov – The project began to take shape during the January 2023 protests against the Israeli government. At that time I had gone back, after residing in the US for several years, to be with my family after covid. When I attended one of the first demonstrations, I couldn’t help but notice the horses and wondered what their role was in all of this. It made me question why horses have historically been forced into such situations. I started filming extensively, capturing hours of footage from the protests, though most of it ended up not making it to the final film.

Horses have been employed in crowd control and protest policing historically, often symbolising state power and the suppression of dissent. In the context of Israeli politics, their use during protests, especially against marginalised or dissenting voices, underscores a broader issue of state violence and the militarisation of policing. As the police violence continued to escalate, I felt the need to start using my camera to document the events. My focus was constantly on the horses. I began to realise that these horses had likely experienced such situations before and were widely used in various ultra-violent contexts, as well as contexts of complicity in expanding settlements in the West Bank.

Then, a good journalist friend of mine, Shaul Greenfeld, at my request used his connections to get me into one of the police cavalry units. There, I observed, with my camera and sound equipment, on my own.

VL – There are segments of footage that are described as ‘manipulated archive footage’. What was the process of manipulating that footage?

AO – The film uses a combination of material based on my own documentation and archival records, both video and audio archives. I retrieved the archival materials from public libraries, and public news channels.

In the animations, they explore history, colonialism, and the gaps in understanding related to specific places, reasons, and emotions. Some of these animations were based on archival footage, while others were created using my own footage. I used handmade prints, which I processed by layering them onto archival footage. I then expanded these into short clips that were used in the final edit.

The use of Artificial Intelligence introduced a sense of sterility, grotesqueness, and distance that felt fitting for the scenes. AI felt like the right method for this short film, not just because of the aesthetic outcome, but because the method itself became part of the message. AI is learning us, learning our history, creating memories, and increasingly being used in warfare and systems of oppression.

VL – How was it filming the police? Did you face any problems with them?

AO – When I contacted them, the police spokesperson permitted me to film without many questions. It was surprisingly easy to get access. I was a bit scared, and still am, because of their authority, but they treated me kindly. I don’t want to say much more, because there is a tension there, between them, the film, and I.

Nevertheless, the fear I felt, standing in front of these police officers as a woman, stayed with me throughout all my encounters with them, both rationally and irrationally.

VL – The film brought to mind the Mahatma Ghandi quote “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. Do you think, in a world where atrocities seem to play out on the news daily, seeing how an institution treats animals has more impact seeing its treatment of humans?

AO – Many artists have used animals as a metaphor for social issues, probably the most notable is Orwell’s Animal Farm. That being said, no I do not think that seeing how an institution treats animals has more impact than seeing their treatment of humans. All humans and animals should be treated with kindness and respect. When we see on the daily news children dying, others see and experience their own children dying in real life. When we see on the daily news species going extinct, others (including nonhumans) experience the effect it has on the environment. And, when we see on the news industrial farms and other industries torturing and abusing animals, it is also felt locally and globally. I remember watching the films, The Cove (Louie Psihoyos, 2009) and Earthlings (Shaun Monson, 2005) and feeling a visceral reaction to them.

The use of horses in policing within the Israeli context can be seen as part of a larger system of control and occupation. Whether deployed in protests within Israel or in the occupied territories, the presence of mounted police is an aggressive assertion of state power, meant to intimidate and disperse those who challenge the status quo. This method of crowd control is used against peaceful protesters, including those advocating for Palestinian rights, where the imagery of mounted police can evoke colonial and imperial histories of oppression.

I think what we see here, is the treatment of horses as a product to mistreat people. The moral progress of the institution of Israel is more reflected by the way they mistreat other people. I do agree with Ghandi, and I think that in our current time when so much violence to people is live streamed, that something might have a different kind of impact when it shows a less seen aspect of those systems of oppression.

VL – You mentioned in the press materials the need to observe subjects, to wait for a significant moment to present itself. Can that be frustrating as a filmmaker? Does it require a lot of patience?

AO – Patience is indeed important, just like in any craft. Since I mostly work solo, I actually appreciate having the freedom to take my time. It allows me to film various things and gradually uncover the story I want to tell. I consider it a privilege to be able to do that.

VL – The most affecting moment for me was the sequence where the horse was being subjected to rapid noise and movement from an inflatable. As you were filming, was it hard to suppress an instinct to intervene?

AO – Yes, it was incredibly hard, and I agree with you – it’s one of the most difficult moments in the film for me as well. I was in shock while it was happening. The police officer wanted to show me something “cool”, and I had no idea what it would be until he set it up. He even suggested where I should position the camera.

It was difficult not to intervene, but I felt it was important to capture and show this moment. If I had stopped it, only I would have known what happened, and it was crucial for me that others see and understand it too.

VL – What do you hope people take away from this film?

AO – I hope the film shows people this process of oppression through the environment and an animal. The Cavalry, not only raises concerns about the treatment of animals but also about the symbolic use of such force to intimidate and control civilian populations. Observing the police officer’s commitment to breaking down these horses, I hope the viewer will take away the fact that the ‘care’ these men have for these horses is much more than they have for the people they look down upon from the backs of the horses, and leave an imagination of the violence they commit when in service.

I also hope that there will be more awareness that there are many people in Israel who are against what the nation is doing, and has been doing for the last more than half a century. The nation has the only policy of immigration based on religion, and in the modern world with so many refugees running from other wars, there are numerous amounts of people there who simply had nowhere else to go.

I hope that people will see the brutality of the government, and hope and do what they can for a change.

VL – Do you have any projects coming up in the future that you can tell us about?

AO – I don’t have any official project coming in the near future, but I hope to start my next project very soon. I believe it will again involve some kind of participant-observer format like The Cavalry.

I don’t think I am a very fast artist, but I came to terms with that, things take time, I think that you need to live life in order to create work that means something, so now I think is the time to explore, to walk a lot, to absorb and look.

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Alina Orlov is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from The Cavalry.