On the surface, a Durango filmmaker’s latest work is about the plight of wild horses. But her more encompassing message is that people share the mustang’s ties to nature and love of freedom of movement.

Mara LeGrand’s 30-minute “Wild Horses in Winds of Change” will have its first public showing in Durango on Sunday. Its premier was at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Calif., where it won a Los Angeles Movie Award, and it has been shown at film festivals from coast to coast.

Proceeds from Sunday’s dinner, film screening and silent auction will fund editing costs of the film.

LeGrand calls the mustang “myth made flesh.”

In the opening moments of the film, she evokes the popular image of the mustang as the epitome of independence, saying, “Wild horses: nature at her most eloquent.”

Wild horses share the soul of their human counterparts, she says.

“They speak of our most cherished longing. They speak of freedom,” LeGrand says. “Just to know they are in our world is to know that in this ever-more-confining age we, too, can be free.”

Thousands of wild horses roam Western states in herds under the care of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The equines are protected by the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Detractors say the agency is not serving the equines well, harassing them with helicopter roundups and letting them languish in holding areas.

Advocates try to find good homes for mustang adoptions and introduce fertility control to reduce reproduction.

In addition to the film, Jonathan Ratner from Western Watersheds Projects will describe the conditions of the wild horses in the West, and local chiropractors Petra and Clay Sullwold, who treat animals as well as people, will share their experiences and insights into equines.

“Wild Horses in Winds of Change” is LeGrand’s third film and second documentary.

The first documentary was “Heart and Soil,” a story about agriculture and sustainability told in the voice of people who work the land within a 200-mile radius of Durango.

The other film, in 2005, was what LeGrand calls narrative fiction. “Ed Meets His Maker” tells the tale of how a boy reconciles himself to the death of his father through the death of his turtle, the Ed of the title.

LeGrand, once a public-health worker in China, Nepal and Tibet, has a backgound in photojournalism.

Ratner is a director with the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group founded in 1993 with headquarters in Hailey, Idaho. It works in eight Western states.

Its stated mission is to protect and restore watersheds and wildlife through education, public policy initiatives and litigation.

Its partner is Advocates for the West, a nonprofit environmental law firm.

daler@durangoherald.com