Eighty-Dollar Champion ‘Snowman’ Featured at Virginia Film Festival

Harry deLeyer purchased Snowman, an Amish plow horse, for $80 off a truck bound for the slaughterhouse in 1956. Less than two years later, Harry and Snowman were stars of the show jumping circuit. In 1992, Snowman was inducted into the Show Jumping Hall of Fame and he was later the subject of Elizabeth Lett’s best seller The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation.

Now Snowman’s legacy and this horse and rider’s remarkable partnership is being spotlighted on film, with a new documentary titled Harry & Snowman. With a release date still pending, the documentary, directed by Ron Davis, is being featured today at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. The film has been screened at multiple other festivals this year, culminating the tour with a showing at the upcoming Equus Film Festival in New York on November 20.

The memory of Snowman lives on, not only in books and on film, but through the Snowman Rescue Fund established by the documentary’s filmmaking team in support of the Omega Horse Rescue & Rehabilitation Center, a group that gives slaughter-bound horses another chance at a happy life.