Guwahati, Oct. 9: The celluloid pastoral of free-grazing ponies on the sylvan river islands of the Brahmaputra will reach a discerning audience in The Hague tomorrow.

Award-winning documentary Riders of the Mist directed by Jorhat-born Roopa Barua will be screened at the Indian Film Festival in the Netherlands. This is a documentary on the bareback pony races of Jorhat in Upper Assam, which is in its 138th year.

The jockeys are villagers of the Mising community who have inherited the racing tradition from their forefathers. The film portrays one such connection between a jockey and his pony.

The 65-minute documentary in English will be screened at Filmhuis Den Haag movie theatre tomorrow and on Tuesday as part of the film festival that ends on October 14.

"It is indeed a matter of great pride that Riders of the Mist will be screened at the same festival with some great cinema like Court, Killa, Margarita with a Straw, Baahubali and Shekhar Kapoor's Bandit Queen," said Barua.

The documentary carries a background score by Joi Barua, including the song Pitol Soku, which is a homage to the bareback riding tradition in Assam.

The film was awarded best documentary at the Houston Indian Film Festival this March, special jury award at the Nashik Film Festival.

Barua said after this film was shown at film festivals, a horse-breeding site from Australia contacted the filmmaker.

Efforts are now in place to do genetic testing on these ponies and map their DNA structure. The tests will be done in Texas, which has the best facilities for equine genetics.

Riders of the Mist is slated to be screened at several festivals in the coming year.

Of special mention is an event in Manipur where the US women's polo team is coming to play in January. Manipur is believed to be the original home of polo. The indigenous pony there is similar to the pony used in the Jorhat races.

Barua, who now lives in Mumbai, grew up in Jorhat town. Riders of the Mist is her first feature length film. Her short film, Falkland Road, was shown at the Afghan Human Rights Festival in 2012. She has a certificate in film production from New York Film Academy and has also taken film criticism courses at the University of California, Berkeley.

Prior to her career as a filmmaker, Barua was a banker with Morgan Stanley in Boston and San Francisco.