Jaripeo Spectrum
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About
Every Christmas in Penjamillo, Michoacán, the jaripeo — an annual rodeo of bull riding, horses, music, drinking, and dust — becomes the town’s public theatre of masculinity. But there’s more to this rugged display than its macho exterior suggests, and as filmmaker Efraín Mojica return home, she witnesses the spectacle with new eyes. Co-directed with Rebecca Zweig, Jaripeo looks beneath the arena’s noise to reveal a queer undercurrent of coded glances, secret hookups, double lives, and desire that has always moved through the tradition.
Mojica and Zweig don’t treat this world as a contradiction. The rodeo becomes both ritual and cover, a place where machismo is performed and quietly undone. The film follows queer rancheros through the arena, the after-party, and the private spaces where tradition begins to slip. Premiering in Sundance’s NEXT section before screening in Berlinale Panorama, Jaripeo follows a community making room for itself inside a culture that was never as straight as it pretended to be.
Content Considerations: Animal wrangling, drug and alcohol abuse, psychological distress dealing with shame and secrecy around gender and sexuality
Mojica and Zweig don’t treat this world as a contradiction. The rodeo becomes both ritual and cover, a place where machismo is performed and quietly undone. The film follows queer rancheros through the arena, the after-party, and the private spaces where tradition begins to slip. Premiering in Sundance’s NEXT section before screening in Berlinale Panorama, Jaripeo follows a community making room for itself inside a culture that was never as straight as it pretended to be.
Content Considerations: Animal wrangling, drug and alcohol abuse, psychological distress dealing with shame and secrecy around gender and sexuality
