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 returns 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
Community Partner
Mexico/USA/France
2026
In Spanish and English with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Carrie Lozano, Ian Bonhôte, Lizzie Gillett
Producer
Sarah Strunin
Cinematography
Josué Eber Morales, Gerardo Guerra
Editor
Analía Goethals
Original Music
Martón Móra, Emilia Ezeta
Efraín Mojica
Efraín Mojica is a photographer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist from Michoacán living in Mexico City. Their work has been shown in galleries around the world, including the Kunstverein Neukölln and MZ galleries in Berlin, Magia Roja in Barcelona, the Factory in Seattle, and most recently, Museo Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Video art has always been a central part of Mojica’s work, and their filmmaking is heavily influenced by their work as a conceptual artist exploring the translation and interpolation of different mediums: light, sound, and matter. Jaripeo (2026) is Efraín’s first feature documentary.
Rebecca Zweig
Rebecca Zweig is a filmmaker, journalist, and poet based in Mexico City. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Nation, and Nexos Revista, among others, and she has been supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures, the Sundance Institute, SFFILM, and the Points North Institute. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and a Mitchell/Burgess Scholar. Her filmmaking is shaped by her poetic practice that focuses on the cadences and metaphors of desire.
Missing VIFF? Check Out What's Playing at the VIFF Centre
American Doctor
One of the most powerful documentaries of the year, this puts us smack in the open wound that is Gaza, filtered through the eyes of three American surgeons (of Palestinian, Jewish and Zoroastrian backgrounds) compelled to do their utmost to alleviate harm.
The History of Concrete
After attending a workshop on pitching saccharine Hallmark movies, John Wilson tries to apply all the same best practices to his documentary about concrete. Frequently absurd and endlessly entertaining detours, asides, and digressions ensue.
La Bola Negra
A big, old-school historical melodrama gets a thrillingly modern, queer makeover from Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who artfully juggle three gay protagonists across stories set in 1932, 1937, and 2017. Winner: Best Director, Cannes. Screening on 35mm.
A. Rimbaud
Patrick Wang (The Bread Factory) presents the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in this staggeringly adventurous and deeply considered movie, a three-hour, one-man show quite unlike anything we have seen before. "Poetic, audacious and singular."
The 39 Steps
In our new film studies series, FRAMEWORK, film scholar Michael van den Bos explores the work of Alfred Hitchcock, across four monochrome masterworks. This week: The 39 Steps (1935), a witty and fast-moving spy thriller from Hitchcock's English period.