Second Chance on the Caprock

As the sun set on that fateful evening in 2007, my father was laid to rest after a long battle with cancer in the place where the entire concession of my ranch could be seen. It was no coincidence. My family all had our special places on the ranch and that was my fathers. My mother, Laure Higgins, was left a grieving widow and a single mother of four.
At the time, the ranch was barren and empty. We had a little house, some cattle, and a little barn with a few horses my mother would keep out there for occasional rides. After my father died, she would go out there to grieve and search for the next steps. She realized, once she regained her vitality, that the horses saved her. She decided right then, she was going to save them.
We sold off most of our cattle and alerted the sheriff to bring abandoned horses our way. It was a brutal beginning. Some of these horses were so emaciated that we had to put them down or spend lots of money to rehabilitate them medically, but that didn’t stop my mother. I started to notice she felt very strongly about saving these animals. My mother has a larger than life personality, and she’s no push over, so I knew these horses were in good hands.
After awhile, we realized we were up to capacity very quickly and we needed to do build more infrastructure, so we did. A full sized arena was built and we were able to train horses there. We had to go through four different foremans before we landed on a 52 year old Mexican cowboy named Francisco Castillo. Frank, as we call him, worked at the local feed yard where he oversaw 600 head of cattle on horseback. He was the guy the locals called if they had a horse they thought wasn’t worth anything. Frank would train those horses and then sell them. He always said that horses are part of American heritage and that they deserve a second chance too. That’s when I saw the operation grow.
Three years later, my mother and Frank have retrained and re-homed over 70 horses and with the full support of the community. That’s when my mother asked me to make a video explaining what goes on down there and why it is a special place. It was just supposed to be a video explaining what happens at the ranch but I knew once I started filming, that there was much more. It was clear that with my mother’s will and passion for these horses and my connection to the land, that it would allow me to make something cinematic for me and my entire family.
Now the film has won numerous awards and has been played in theaters as far as Russia and continues to run in the festival circuit today.