Word: tir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are, in fact, the adorable inheritors of a threatened Irish subculture, that of the Travellers, or Celtic Gypsies. It is their grandfather, who continues to follow the old, threatened ways, who brings the animal he calls ! Tir na nOg (Land of Eternal Youth in Gaelic) to them in the unhappy Dublin housing project where they live with their father (Gabriel Byrne), who abandoned his free-roving heritage after his wife's death...
...never mind. Televised westerns have filled the gap, imbuing them with the spirit of benign outlawry. They assert it first in the richly comic sequence in which they try to hide their horse from the police (who are in league with a rich man who wants to turn Tir na nOg into a champion jumper) in their tiny apartment. They maintain it as they move on into the west, where one of their refuges is, appropriately, a movie theater closed for the night. The sweetly funny improvisations of their flight through the Irish countryside all help them to resist sentimentality...