Gaucho Gaucho

Director: Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw

GAUCHO GAUCHO is a documentary film about an ensemble of iconic gauchos living beyond the boundaries of the modern world. It weaves together a mosaic of tales about gauchos confronting the fragility of their world in the face of unprecedented change. The stories follow the lives of men and women of different ages, backgrounds, and talents who are all connected in their fight to remain free.

A gaucho is a South American cowboy. They travel on horseback, accompanied by their dogs as they move their cattle through landscapes of staggering beauty. The handmade clothing they wear, woolen ponchos, bombacha trousers, and boina hats, are signs to the outside world that they will remain forever free, unshackled by the boundaries and bindings of the modern world.
They are a community suspended in time, floating between the past and present, dream and reality. Their identity is a convergence of mythologies forged in a land that has refused to cede its wild soul. Their forebears were the rebels that took up arms to fight for freedom against the Spanish. Today, they remain outsiders, the renegades holding the line against an invasion of modernity that seeks to replace the bonds of community and connection with the sterile sameness that has swept across the globe.

Awards: Sundance Film Festival: Special Jury Prize
Locarno International Film Festival: Audience Award