Directors: Efraín Mojica, Rebecca Zweig
Producer: Sarah Strunin
Editor: Analía Goethals
Cinematography: Josué Eber Morales, Gerardo Guerra
Original Music: Emilia Ezeta, Marton Radics
Sound Design: Maria Rojas
Country: Mexico / United States / France
Runtime: 70 minutes
Languages: Spanish, English Subtitles
Festival Section: Sundance Film Festival 2026 — NEXT
Park City, UT—There is no single moment in Jaripeo where queerness announces itself. It drifts instead—through glances held a beat too long, bodies brushing in the dark, a hand resting where it might not be noticed. Set within the jaripeos of Michoacán, the hypermasculine rodeos that pulse with ritual, alcohol, and bravado, Jaripeo resists the familiar documentary impulse to expose, explain, or resolve. Directed by Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, the film offers something quieter and more demanding: an invitation to sit with queerness as it already exists inside tradition—sustained through proximity, silence, and care.
The jaripeo is a space of excess. Bulls buck violently beneath riders seeking glory; men shout, drink, and press close to one another; music pounds as night settles in. Mojica and Zweig do not frame this environment as spectacle to be decoded from a distance. They film it as atmosphere—thick, embodied, and disorienting—allowing sound, texture, and rhythm to do as much narrative work as dialogue. Masculinity here is not abstract. It is performed again and again through endurance, risk, and repetition.
Structurally, Jaripeo operates in a hybrid register that mirrors its thematic concerns. Digital vérité footage anchors the film in the present, while Super 8 sequences soften the frame, blurring memory and desire. The Super 8 camera functions not as nostalgia, but as attention—a queer way of seeing that lingers on belts, boots, hats, hands, torsos in motion. Faces are often partial or fleeting. Bodies are present without being pinned down. The effect is not voyeuristic; it is relational. We are not asked to consume these figures, but to notice them.
Through Mojica, who appears not as an omniscient narrator but as a participant returning to a place that shaped him, we meet others who move through the jaripeo with varying degrees of visibility and risk. Figures like Noé and Joseph complicate any easy opposition between machismo and queerness. What emerges across these encounters is not transgression, but care. Conversations unfold without urgency, often circling around what families know, what they accept, and what remains politely undiscussed. These exchanges feel less like interviews than check-ins—moments of mutual recognition rather than confession.
Some early responses to Jaripeo have expressed a desire for more—more time with individual subjects, more narrative development, more explicit storytelling—arguing that the film lingers too long on atmosphere and not long enough on biography. That reaction is understandable, especially given how compelling these figures are on screen. But viewing the film through that lens risks misunderstanding what Jaripeo is choosing not to do. This restraint is not an aesthetic limitation or a narrative gap. It is an ethical and artistic choice—an ethical position rather than a narrative deficiency. Rather than extracting a lived story or demanding legibility, the film works through proximity, shared memory, and partial access, honoring the realities of queer life in communities where visibility is negotiated, not assumed.
That ethical stance is inseparable from the film’s artistic vision. In an interview conducted ahead of the film’s January 25 Sundance premiere, Rebecca Zweig described Jaripeo as “the longest poem I’ve ever written,” emphasizing that its structure—metaphorical, rhythmic, and deliberately restrained—was intentional from the outset. Written like a poem, the film allows images to crash and echo rather than explain. The rodeo functions as metaphor; memory collaborates with form; sound and light carry meaning where language would flatten it. Less is more here not as minimalism, but as method.
That ethic of care extends beyond aesthetics and into the conditions under which the film was made. Over the course of four years, much of the crew lived in Mojica’s family home while filming—sleeping under the same roof, sharing meals, and becoming part of the household. Jaripeo was not made through brief visits or extractive access, but through sustained presence. It was, unmistakably, a labor of love—one carried not only by Mojica, but by his entire family, whose generosity and trust made the film possible.
This approach to masculinity aligns closely with the work of Octavio Paz, whose mid-20th-century writings on Mexican identity remain foundational. In El laberinto de la soledad, Paz understands machismo not simply as dominance or aggression, but as a posture shaped by solitude, emotional restraint, and historical pressure—a performance forged under conditions of conquest, Catholic morality, and nationalist mythmaking. Masculinity, in this reading, is less about power than about containment.
While Gloria Anzaldúa later critiqued and reframed machismo from a Chicana, U.S.-based borderlands perspective, her intervention responds to a different historical and geographic context—one shaped by diaspora, racialization in the United States, and the psychic violence of the border. For Jaripeo, which is grounded in rural Michoacán rather than migration or exile, Paz’s framework offers a closer cultural alignment: one that allows masculinity to be read as inherited, contradictory, and vulnerable—making room for queerness without reducing it to either rebellion or caricature.
The film’s abstracted sequences—red-lit cornfields, bodies illuminated against night, horses and riders suspended between motion and stillness—do not replace lived experience; they perform it. They evoke shared queer memory without reproducing it literally. What is left unsaid here is not absence. It is intention.
That intention comes into sharp focus in the film’s final moments. Sitting in the cab of a truck, Mojica reflects on the limits of deconstruction and the weight of inheritance. He speaks of trying to separate himself from the “macho” mentality he was raised within, then stops short. To deny it entirely, he suggests, would be to refuse where he comes from—the values, traditions, and familial closeness that still hold beauty for him. And yet he also questions which of those traditions have grown antiquated, which behaviors no longer reflect who he is. The film does not resolve that contradiction. It lets it stand. He trails off. He takes a drink.
What makes that moment so affecting is not that it answers anything, but that it doesn’t. Mojica does not arrive at certainty; he arrives at honesty. He names uncertainty without apology or performance. That act—plain, unfinished, deeply human—contains the film’s deepest truth.
Jaripeo does not insist that identity be clarified, purified, or finalized. It suggests something quieter and more difficult: that it is okay not to know. That naming uncertainty—without forcing resolution—is itself an act of bravery. The film treats ambiguity not as failure, but as a place of care. One can question tradition without erasing it, hold beauty alongside harm, and live inside contradiction without demanding closure.
This ethic is inseparable from the film’s visual beauty. The Super 8 images are intimate and tactile, reframing the rodeo as memory, desire, and metaphor. Light and sound move like verse. The beauty here is not ornamental; it is how the film thinks.
In its final movement, Jaripeo offers no answers and no instructions. It offers permission—to sit with uncertainty, to speak it aloud, and to recognize that doing so, honestly and imperfectly, is beautiful.
Note: All quoted dialogue is transcribed from the film’s English subtitles.
Screenings & Tickets
Jaripeo is an official selection of the NEXT section at the Sundance Film Festival.
In-person screenings:
- January 25, 2026 — The Yarrow Theatre (World Premiere), Park City
- January 26, 2026 — Megaplex Redstone, Park City
- January 27, 2026 — Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City
- January 30 & February 1, 2026 — Holiday Village Cinemas, Park City
Online screenings:
Available to the public January 29–February 1, 2026, with additional access for credentialed press and industry beginning January 28.
Tickets and screening availability can be found at the official Sundance Film Festival website.
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