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
Mexico/USA/France
2026
In Spanish and English with English subtitles
Indigenous & Community Access
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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.
Spectrum
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Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig set their sights on Penjamillo, Michoacán, where the annual Jaripeo — a rodeo of bull riding, drinking, and dust that serves as the town’s public theatre of masculinity — becomes a stage for queer desire.
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Image: © Mirabel Pictures
