“How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression”, D.H. Lawrence.
Screened at BFI Flare this week, the 70-minute Jaripeo offers a sort of toughness masked in private complexity. Set within Mexico’s traditional rodeo culture, the documentary doesn’t seek to challenge cultural behaviour outright, nor does it attempt to redefine it in obvious ways. It observes, patiently and without judgement, how one type of masculinity is lived, performed, and experienced from within. Co-directed by Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, the film balances a healthy amount of psycho-analytical flavour with honest observation. Mojica’s proximity to the subject matter brings raw authenticity, while Zweig’s female perspective allows the film to hold its ambiguity, non-tempestuously moving away from the urge to explain and define each scene or any characters. It is set in the Mexican state of Michoacán, where Jaripeo takes its name from the rural rodeos that act as annual gatherings – part celebration, part spectacle – bringing communities together through tradition and performance. At its core, Jaripeo traces a deeply personal journey – Mojica’s perspective – one that moves between community, subject matters, and self, without ever fully finding the need to separate them.
The documentary films in an experimental, almost dreamlike register that, rather than following a linear narrative, lets atmosphere and reflection speak. It’s a four-year process film, organically letting the film unfold, drawing the audience into a world that feels lived-in with real people and their own complexities. There is a quiet sense of nostalgia that runs through the film, heightened by sequences shot on Super 8. Even against the charged backdrop of the rodeo — with all its noise, risk, and bravado – it is the smaller, easily overlooked moments that the film returns to, holding them with a kind of reverence. There’s always a tendency to see masculinity in rigid terms, defined by certain expected performance: strength, restraint, and emotional distance. Cinema has often reinforced this, particularly in stories where same-sex desire emerges within male-dominated worlds, usually leading to conflict, punishment, rupture, or quiet tragedy. The wise choice to film in Super 8 footage becomes more than an aesthetic choice. It offers a different way of seeing, one that captures the subtleties of gesture, proximity, and glances. The rodeo culture amplifies the toughness within a space defined by machismo, yet it can still reveal a coded language beneath the surface, proving that identity is layered – never singular. Super 8 works as a magnifying glass for all the secret coding going on beneath the surface between the men.
There is Noe, a macho and queer ranchero whose views almost represent the local like-minded men, and with whom Mojica maintains a close connection. Then there is Joseph, a gender-fluid, stylised diva who responds with a cheerful “bye” to a homophobic slur. And Pirinola, the resident drag queen who cheers up the crowd. Mojica’s approach towards the subject matters is by showing his own vulnerability, building trust, and letting each character open up. The documentary implies how group harmony is maintained over unnecessary conflict around differences at the deepest layer of personal experience. This also explains why some, like Noe and Pirinola, stay, while others break the pattern – one way being leaving the town, as Mojica does. The code is maintained, yet silence is also managed; everyone knows, but no one states – stability maintains.
Where films like Brokeback Mountain frame same-sex desire as something that ultimately breaks men apart, Jaripeo shows a world where it is accepted into the structure around them. It doesn’t announce itself, nor demand a resolution. It exists in gestures; in glances held a moment too long, in physical closeness that feels both natural and charged, in a shared understanding that rarely needs to be spoken aloud. There is a rhythm to this world in the spectacle of the masculine rodeo, which sits alongside moments that feel warmly intimate. And yet, nothing appears out of place. What might be read as contradiction elsewhere is simply part of the fabric in this environment. Within tightly bonded, male-dominated spaces, proximity and trust create conditions where desire can exist without needing to be explicitly defined. It is not a question of visibility versus secrecy, but of what is acknowledged and what is actioned upon.
This sense of restraint feels less like repression and more like negotiation. Boundaries exist – understood rather than enforced – shaping what can be expressed openly and what remains implied. The result is a form of coexistence that resists easy categorisation or labelling, particularly for audiences more familiar with Western narratives of identity, fixed rules, and disclosure. Rather than offering answers, Jaripeo speaks for itself. It suggests that masculinity, in certain contexts, is not as fixed or oppositional as it is often portrayed; that it can stretch, contain, and accommodate more than it openly admits. And in that space, something quietly revealing takes shape, and can be beautiful if one has the decency to see it in its most natural form.
The 40th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival takes place 18th-29th March at BFI Southbank
