Kim Walnes and The Gray Goose. Photo by Peter Gower.
Six years after the famous “Cinderella horse” Snowman passed away, another gray horse stepped onto the USA center stage, but this time it was the world of eventing who welcomed a gray superstar. Kim Walnes and The Gray Goose took the eventing world by storm. In 1982, they not only won Rolex Kentucky, but also won two World Championship medals. Kim and “The Gray” were so iconic that he was inducted into the USEA Hall of Fame in 2012 and they’re now the subject of a new documentary.
Set to be released in 2024, “The Gray: The Kim Walnes Story” will not only chronicle Kim and The Gray’s illustrious competitive career, but it will also cover the tragic, and unsolved, murder of her daughter and Kim’s new career providing transformative life coaching with help from her horse, Gideon Goodheart. The documentary first made a splash when a casting call went up on Facebook for a gray horse and competent rider. It’s not often that an equestrian-focused casting call comes out and the filmmakers weren’t sure what type of response they would get. To their surprise, the post blew up.
“I think landscape is able to tell a story in a different way, in a kind of palpable way. We realized that we really needed the perspective of a rider to be able to show what that terrain was really like,” said co-director Shanyn Fiske. “We put out a casting call for a Virginia-based competent rider and a gray horse. I was expecting maybe 10 people to answer and we got over 100 people of every age, ability, capability, location, wanting to be a part of this and we were flabbergasted.”
Skyeler Voss riding Argyle for the Kim Walnes documentary. Photo by Shanyn Fiske
After sorting through the candidates, the team has chosen Skyeler Voss as the rider who will be filmed in the documentary. While the majority of the film will use archival footage of Kim and The Gray, as well as interviews, Shanyn wanted to get some shots of a rider galloping a gray horse along the same countryside Kim once used to condition The Gray before some of their historic wins.
“There are moments in the film that are going to be more artistically pitched, where we could have a wide angle shot of a gray horse galloping on the same terrain that Kim did and those shots are going to convey the terrain, the environment, and the atmosphere,” said Shanyn. “If people want to understand that as Kim and The Gray, awesome, but I don’t think at any moment we’re going to try to make Skyeler act as Kim.”
For her part, Skyeler is overjoyed to be chosen as part of the project and has developed a close relationship with Kim. “It is an absolute honor to have the opportunity to meet Kim and represent this historic eventing duo! I grew up wanting a gray horse because of the magical Gray Goose. I am lucky to have a few good grays myself now and cannot wait to gallop the same fields Kim and Gray tackled,” Skyeler said. “Kim is such a role model for eventing professionals and competitive horse moms. In the short time I have been in contact with Kim, she has gone above and beyond to reach out, give me guidance during Argyle’s 4*L, and has become a wonderful mentor and fast friend.”
Kim chose Skyeler to figuratively represent herself and The Gray for several reasons, the biggest of which is that Skyeler most reminded Kim of herself. “So her relationship with her horse, Giles, reminded me a lot of mine with The Gray. And Giles looks a lot like The Gray, he acts a lot like The Gray. And she is a very quiet, sympathetic, empathic rider,” Kim said. “And then I came to find out later, she was trained by Jimmy Wofford, all the way through from the time she was 12 until he died. So no wonder her style of riding is similar to what I was taught by Jack Le Goff.”
Kim Walnes meets Skyeler Voss’s horse, Argyle, on the set of the documentary. Photo by Shanyn Fiske
It will truly be a “full circle” moment when Skyeler gallops her gray horse on the same trails Kim rode a thousand times with The Gray. Not only does Skyeler have a similar riding style to Kim, thanks to her training with Jack Le Goff, but Skyeler will also be wearing Kim’s old cross country shirt, which Kim saved for all these years. It seems fated that Skyeler would be part of the team, as the shirt fits her perfectly.
Unlike the first attempt at a documentary on Kim, this iteration of the project doesn’t shy away from hard topics. While the film will still chronicle her competitive career, the real heart of the film will focus on the work Kim does now, which evolved out of the murder of her daughter, Andy. Today, Kim works with her horse Gideon to heal others via transformative life coaching.
“There are very few people on this planet that have not experienced trauma at some point in their life, not to mention all the horses out there that have experienced trauma, right? We’re taught to have a stiff upper lip, and to go forward, and leave it all behind. Well, it doesn’t. Those things just get stored in your body. They don’t just leave, they don’t just dissipate, the feelings that we do not address get stored in our body, and then they come back and haunt us,” said Kim. “I’ve always just been honest about what’s going on with me to folks because it doesn’t feel comfortable to hide it. And I feel like if this documentary can help one person who has experienced something similar, then that’s what floats my boat. I just want to help other people move through their traumas and find a life that is fulfilling for them on the other side.”
The whole team behind the documentary is on board with Kim’s goals. “We want to follow the story of Kim and The Gray Goose but we also want very much to talk about how horses have become a very important source of healing for Kim, from the trauma of Andy’s death, from various other traumas, and how she’s really working with Gideon now to help other people use their relationships with horses to heal from their own trauma,” said Shanyn.
Kim Walnes stands with Skyeler Voss onboard Argyle. Photo by Shanyn Fiske
This documentary sounds like it will be a horse film unlike any other. Far from the Hallmark-style stories about young girls moving to the country and miraculously taming unrideable horses, “The Gray” has the potential to reach far outside of the close-knit, and often exclusive, equestrian community. The team behind the film hopes that the story will give people a new perspective on the animals we surround ourselves with everyday and will focus on how animals help us heal.
“You know, one of the reasons I’m very invested in this film is because horses have saved my life personally, on a couple of occasions,” Shanyn said. “So I think anybody who has turned to animals, whether that be horses or other kinds of animals, for that repair, for that recovery from trauma, can relate to the story.”
“All of life is sentient and it communicates, we’re just the ones who don’t share a language,” said Kim when I asked her what she hopes people will take away from the film. “Humanity has called other animals dumb, meaning they have no intelligence, they can’t reason. And that’s just not true. I’m hoping people will get a message from this film that might change their perspective on the world around us.”
There are a lot of big hopes and dreams riding on the film. Shanyn and Kim have their fingers crossed that they’ll be able to show it at large film festivals, like South by Southwest, and that one day viewers will stumble across it on Netflix and click play, unaware that their lives are about to change.
The team working on “The Gray” includes co-director John Welsh, producer Tabbetha Marron, co-director Shanyn Fiske, and filmmaker Caleb Doranz. This project relies on crowdfunding for its budget. To support the film, donations can be made via Paypal here.
