Thanks to popular culture, sport illiterates are able to get a glimpse of the great sacrifices that dancers and gymnasts – to give some examples – have to make to become successful professionals: dietary restrictions, extreme diets, dangerous injuries and sometimes even hormone treatments. Jockeys, those feeble-looking men that ride horses on races also live under a strict control of their body from the moment they are admitted into a horseback-riding school. Little Man, Jean-Guillaume Sonnier’s medium-length film, opens the doors of one of these schools to the audience, and invites them in to learn about the problems that a group of jockey trainees have to confront.

David, the main character of this story, is a shy but determined learner that greatly admires Eliab, who is a bit older than him and is in charge of a well-known racetrack. To try to get close to him, David will become an accomplice of his mysterious nocturnal getaways from the boarding school.

Little man (Jean-Guillaume Sonnier, 2014)

Jean-Guillaume Sonnier (1988) has been a member of the Film department at the Ecole Cantonale d’art of Lausanne since 2008. In 2011 he produced  Another game (A quoi tu joues?) that received the Meilleur Espoir Suisse Award at the Locarno Festival. Little Man received the Pardino d’Argento Award at the same festival this past year.

Little Man is part of the Official Selection of the 8th Edition of the International Medium-length Film Festival La Cabina that will take place from the 5th to the 15th of November at the Filmoteca de Valencia.

LITTLE MAN | Jean-Guillaume Sonnier · Switzerland · 2014 · 30 min