*Worldwide FESTIVAL Rights
jaripeo
directed by Efraín Mojica & Rebecca Zweig
Mexico, USA, France / 75 Mins / Spanish, English
Logline:
JARIPEO is a feature hybrid documentary that journeys to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos. What starts as a celebration of tradition, descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing. A reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.
Synopsis:
Every Christmas in Penjamillo, Michoacán, the annual jaripeo unites locals and returning U.S. migrants in a celebration of cowboy culture, nostalgia, and masculinity, while beneath the spectacle a hidden queer subculture quietly unfolds. Filmmaker Efraín, who grew up between Penjamillo and Riverside, California, blends personal experience with Super 8 footage, stylized memory, and raw verité to interrogate the machismo at its core. Through encounters with Noé, a macho cowboy living partly in secret, and Joseph, a flamboyant jaripeo superfan and community pillar, the film becomes an intimate journey of self-recognition within a traditionally masculine world.
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Efraín Mojica is a Michoacán-born artist based in Mexico City. Their multidisciplinary work, shown from Berlin to Mexico City, explores light, sound, and matter through a conceptual art lens. Video art is central to their practice. Jaripeo is their first feature film.
Rebecca Zweig is a Mexico City-based filmmaker and writer. Her work appears in The New York Times and The Nation, with support from Sundance and Chicken & Egg Pictures. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her filmmaking is shaped by her poetic practice. Jaripeo is her first feature film.
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2026
World Premiere: Sundance FF (NEXT)
International / European Premiere: Berlinale (Panorama)
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Year: 2026
Country: Mexico, US, UK
Length: 75 mins
Director: Efraín Mojica, Rebecca Zweig
Producer: Sarah Strunin
Executive Producer: Carrie Lozano, Lizzie Gillett, Ian Bonhôte
Co-Producer: Carine Chichkowsky, Gerardo Guerra, Juan Pablo Gonzalez
Editor: Analía Goethals
Cinematographer: Josué Eber Morales, Gerardo Guerra
Composer: Emilia Ezeta, Marton Radics
Sound Designer: Maria Rojas
Efraín Mojica
Rebecca Zweig
