Riding home
A six month solo, female-led horseback journey from Austria to northern Norway
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synopsis
We live in a world that asks us to move faster and faster. To keep up, stay productive, respond immediately, achieve more and constantly move forward. For most of us, this pace becomes overwhelming - leaving us disconnected from our bodies, the people we love and the living world around us.
Karolin Frick steps out of the speed of everyday life and into a radically different rhythm:
Riding Home is a six-month, 4,000-kilometre female-led journey on horseback from Austria to Northern Norway. Travelling with two horses - Señorita and Donner - and in parts with a camerawoman (yet to be decided), the rhythm of walking. weather, landscape, animals and the body set the pace.
There is no shortcut: a tired horse means stopping, weather changes plans, and the terrain determines the route. A schedule can no longer be controlled but the timeline unfolds on its own terms.
Moving through varied landscapes, Riding Home follows the gradual shift from doing to sensing, from controlling to relating, from moving through the world to coming into relationship with it - through the body and through paying attention to sensation and capacity.
The journey becomes an experiment in slowing down enough to listen and feel - on screen a visual meditation that will leave the viewer feeling hopeful, empowered and with a sense of curiosity about their immediate surroundings: human body and earth body alike.
Riding will definitely not be the fastest way, it may also not be the easiest way, but it will be the most meaningful.
meet the team
Chief of trail Officer, protagonist
Señorita, born in 2004, is a german riding pony mare who just loves to go out on adventures.
She has high endurance, inherent motivation and has grown more calm over the years - which is a good thing.
She’s a sensitive soul, likes to be at a distance to the other horses, and also doesn’t like to be cuddled.
Yet, it feels as if Karolin and her have bonded over shared traumatic pasts and there is a deep connection between them.
Señorita will join the journey as my riding horse as she needs the riders body to lead and give her safety.
Head of supplies and provisions, protagonist
Donner, born in 2001 is a welsh pony gelding with a steady temperament, often leading through uncertainty and providing calm reliability across challenging routes.
When Señorita can be a bit jumpy or doubting, he simply is unfazed.
He doesn’t like repetition, which is why he’s the perfect fit for a journey where not a single path looks the same.
He’s a snack master - which is probably why he gets along with Karolin - and has the perfect stability for being the pack horse.
director, producer, writer, protagonist
Karolin is an Austrian social and environmental anthropologist, somatic practitioner and trauma-sensitive yoga teacher whose work explores ecology, embodiment, slowness and alternative ways of relating to the living world.
With a background in outdoor guiding, long-distance slow travel and ecological practice -including work in Guatemala, Australia, Arctic Norway and India - she combines anthropology, somatics and storytelling to explore the relationship between human and non-human nature.
Having experienced first-hand what it means to lose, and then rediscover a sense of aliveness through the more-than-human world, Riding Home becomes both her most personal work and the natural culmination of years of exploration.
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