White Sands Festival Honours 'Nokota Heart'

'Nokota Heart', a feature documentary by Irish writer/director Sean Garland, walked away from this year’s White Sand’s International Film Festival with the title of Best Feature Documentary. The Awards Ceremony, held recently in New Mexico, USA, was attended by ‘Nokota Heart’ producer Lawrence Fee from Yard Ireland who also edited the piece. Lawrence collected the Best Feature Documentary Award on behalf of himself and Sean Garland who is the film’s director and director of photography. The feature doc tells the true story of Leo Kuntz, Vietnam vet turned horse rancher, his life and loves out on the Great Plains of North America and his fight to save the legendary Nokota horse of Sitting Bull from extinction in the inexorable onslaught of the 21st century. Lawrence describes the project for IFTN saying: “Intimate and raw, grand and daring, this is W.B.Yeats meets Sam Shepard, the vanishing American frontier through the prism of an Irish storyteller, suffused with the quiet mysticism and unassuming humanity of an everyman, humble onto himself yet unquestionably an unsung hero left behind by time.”...more