A horse born wild in the American West and a teenage girl learning to trust again find each other in Black Beauty, Ashley Avis's 2020 family drama.
What is Black Beauty about?
Beauty starts life free, roaming open country before being rounded up and brought to Birtwick Stables. There she meets Jo Green, a teenager sent to live with relatives after losing her parents, who is struggling to feel at home anywhere. The two form a bond that steadies them both, but the story doesn't let that bond stay simple: Beauty passes through different owners and different circumstances over the years, some kind and some not, while Jo grows up carrying the memory of their connection even when they're apart. The film follows both the horse's changing fortunes and Jo's own path into adulthood, structured as a series of chapters rather than one continuous adventure, with the ranch and stable settings doing a lot of the visual storytelling. Family strain, financial pressure, and the practical realities of caring for an animal that isn't always easy to handle all shape what happens to Beauty along the way.
About the cast
Mackenzie Foy plays Jo Green, the teenager at the emotional center of the story, while Kate Winslet provides Beauty's narration, giving the horse a voice without the film needing to anthropomorphize her on screen. Claire Forlani, Iain Glen, Calam Lynch, and Fern Deacon round out the human cast across the various households and stables Beauty passes through during the story.
Context & significance
This version of Black Beauty is director Ashley Avis's update of Anna Sewell's nineteenth-century novel, moving the setting to the American West rather than the rural England of the original book. Released in 2020, it keeps the novel's chapter-by-chapter structure, following Beauty through a series of owners rather than staying with a single family for the whole runtime, and it keeps the device of narrating from the horse's own point of view. The shift in setting brings ranch life, ropes, and open plains into a story originally built around English stables and carriages.
Watching Black Beauty on Ktime
Black Beauty is available on K-Time with a free account login, and it includes Persian dubbing for viewers who want to watch Jo and Beauty's story in Farsi. K-Time's interface is built with the Farsi-speaking diaspora in mind, so switching on the Persian dub is straightforward from the title's playback settings.