With its world premiere at this year's Sundance Film Festival as part of the NEXT section, Jaripeo established itself as one of the most captivating and thought-provoking documentaries.
Blackmagic Design
Directed by Michoacán-born photographer, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Efraín Mojica and Mexico City-based filmmaker, journalist and poet Rebecca Zweig, and produced by Sarah Strunin, "Jaripeo" follows Mojica as he enters a traditional Mexican rural rodeo—a jaripeo—where cowboys ride wild bulls.
Through vérité and Super 8 footage, Mojica and Zweig invite viewers into a space of traditional and performative masculinity, interviewing three men to explore the hidden queer subculture of the Jaripeo. What begins as a celebration of tradition descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing.
The film is comprised of mixed media, captured primarily with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K operated by cinematographer Josué Eber Morales, with additional cinematography by Gerardo Guerra and director Efraín Mojica. For Morales, the main goal with the camera was to capture real vérité-style moments in the jaripeos, giving them an epic tone to make hypermasculinity feel undeniable. At the same time, I wanted to create cinematic and stylized atmospheres for the prepared scenes, which function as metaphors throughout the film.
"What really attracted me to 'Jaripeo' was the contrast between the two main things that happen in the project: the hyper-masculine vibe that is in the foreground in these events and the almost invisible queer subculture that exists in the same space and time," Morales explained.
"At these rodeos there is always a large crowd and incessant music at full volume that hardly lets you hear your own thoughts. To shoot in that kind of environment, you have to move fast between people, so I needed a compact, super-reliable camera with a wide dynamic range that could handle really tough lighting conditions. We were shooting from morning to afternoon, and sometimes even at night, so the camera had to keep up with all those changes in light."
Morales continued, "I've had a long and very good experience with Blackmagic Design. I actually started out doing color correction and DaVinci Resolve was the program I learned from. Later, when I was already working as a cinematographer and the first Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera came out, I bought one and shot a lot of projects with it because the image quality was so good."
In "Jaripeo", the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K was used in different ways, mainly on a tripod and handheld camera, but sometimes mounted on a DJI RS 3 Pro. "This is a project that is constantly changing aesthetically, moving from cinema vérité to a much more polished cinematic look. Therefore, the visual language was always evolving, which ended up being one of the strengths of the film," said Morales. "For me, the biggest advantage of using the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K is that it can produce cinema-quality images while being integrated into a really small, easy-to-use body, with a super simple menu, so you can focus on creating images and not worry about the camera."
Shooting "Jaripeo" was not without its challenges, but with the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, the team managed to accomplish their mission. Morales added: "There is a scene in the film that was a great challenge: a charro riding a mechanical bull in the middle of a field at night. The location had no lighting, so we had to light it with just a couple of LED tubes. Adding effects like strobe lights made everything more difficult—from focus to staging—but it was totally worth it, because aesthetically it's one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie."
Shooting in Blackmagic RAW also helped the team deal with extreme light conditions and workflow in post-production. "We had a very strong midday sun or very low light at night. I also chose Blackmagic RAW because the compression to quality ratio is excellent. You have all the flexibility of RAW without constantly worrying about running out of hard drive space," he said.
The film was mastered and graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio by colorist Karla Martinez and color supervisor Øyvind Stiauren at Terminal, a post-production studio in Mexico City.
Working with DaVinci Resolve Studio allowed the Terminal team to design the best workflow for the film. For complex shaping processes, Blackmagic RAW and Super 8 formats, online processes, and color grading, relying on DaVinci Resolve Studio helped Martinez and Stiauren be more creative and give the director reassurance that everything would work as intended.
Martinez explained, "Mojica and Zweig came to us with the idea of what they envisioned the aesthetics of the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K and Super 8 footage would look like, including a breakdown of sequences, feelings that needed to be conveyed, and even sounds, so that we could approach the color grading process as naturally as possible."
"In DaVinci Resolve Studio, we set up our color management workflow and created two different looks, one for each media format. For both of us, we tried to maintain the natural essence of what they saw when shooting the film. Elements such as nature, skies, characters and color textures were carefully respected and transferred to the film. Some of the main tools we used were the primary circles and the Magic Mask, as they allowed us to achieve the perfect saturation, the exposure we wanted, and work faster. For the Super 8 footage, we kept the celluloid texture and gave it more saturation to increase the feeling that Mojica was dreaming."
Stiauren added: "Because it's a documentary, the lighting conditions can be challenging at times, so having these tools on hand, along with the Power Windows, was a big help. We also use the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panels to speed up our color process with accuracy and efficiency, and we leverage remote monitoring features for post-production reviews."
After a successful and emotional premiere at Sundance, "Jaripeo" is preparing to continue its tour of different festivals this year.
"This project began filming four years ago with a tiny crew of only five people. I never imagined that it would reach the audience and the reception it has had, and it fills me with joy because we started filming simply to make films with friends," concluded Morales. "Looking back, the biggest strength of the tools we used was that we never had to worry about technical issues. That freedom allowed us to focus on what really mattered: building our film."
