One of the most thrilling scenes in recent cinema history comes not from a big budget Hollywood production but via independent documentary filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, directors of Gaucho Gaucho.
To capture the tremendous horsemanship of cowboys and cowgirls in a remote area of Argentina, Dweck and Kershaw wanted to film the gauchos galloping at great speed across the open range. But pulling off a tracking shot of that nature required a Herculean effort.
“First, we had to get a device to film that,” Dweck explains. “And there was only one guy that had that. He was in Buenos Aires. He had a Polaris truck, like a four-wheel drive SUV. It’s like a Mad Max-mobile, with an arm and a gyro, very complicated machine. And we had to truck it 25 hours across [the country] because we were on the other end of Argentina completely, near Chile and Bolivia, and he’s kind of on the Atlantic. And then we had to take it up these high mountain roads.”
Dweck continues, “And then we had to figure out how, at high speeds at 35, 40 miles an hour over cactus and giant boulders, to be able to film that scene. And we looked at some John Ford films, chase scenes, of course, to say, how can we beat him at his own game? How can we get a long two-kilometer shot, continuous? The last scene of the film had no cutting at all.”
Adds Kershaw, “It always goes back to this idea of how do we bring the audience into this experience of what it’s like to be a gaucho on horseback? And you see human and animal merging into one… When you’re in the car tracking them, it’s as close as you can get to the experience of being gaucho riding.”
Gaucho Gaucho, winner of awards at the Sundance Film Festival and Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, immerses viewers in a timeless space “of iconic gauchos living beyond the boundaries of the modern world… 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.”
Dweck and Kershaw, who are the cinematographers, shot the film in lustrous black and white, documenting not only dynamic scenes in the saddle, but quieter moments that reveal the character of life in the remote high desert region.
“We want you to sit and observe and feel how we feel in these places,” Dweck says. “So, notice the gauchos, notice the boots that are made from cowhide, the lassos — somebody took their time to make a lasso by hand. Look at the pot on the wall, the pot’s probably handed down five generations. Look at the bricks that were made by hand in someone’s home… Maybe you reflect on something in your own life, but also a place that you enjoy being because we like being in the place. So, that’s part of our little secret sauce, is that taking time.”
That secret sauce, flavored with a certain subterranean delicacy, nourished The Truffle Hunters, their 2020 Oscar-shortlisted documentary shot in the Piedmont region of Italy, near the French-Swiss border. There, too, the American filmmakers took audiences into a timeless world with protagonists as colorful and rich as the lush countryside.
“We’re thinking very carefully about everything that is in the frame and putting the camera at the right place at the right time,” Kershaw notes. “And it’s this dance that we’re doing with reality, trying to figure out a way that we can create an image that has the contents that will hopefully transmit the feeling of the place, but creating that image in a way that life can go on in front of the camera unencumbered and that we have the truth of real people’s experiences… [It] takes years to get to know people well enough to have the relationships, so you know what’s happening in their life.”
In Gaucho Gaucho, the lives depicted range from young riders to seniors.
“In the film, there’s a father-son story. It’s Jony and Solano, and Jony’s 5 years old; and we have Lucas and Poncho and they’re 11 and 9 [respectively],” Kershaw told us at Sundance, where the film premiered. “And then we have an older gaucho, Lelo, who’s like the gray beard and he’s 84 years old. But there’s this intergenerational exchange of knowledge and traditions that we loved seeing. We loved seeing a culture that was so alive.”
The extraordinary photography is not meant to be an end in and of itself.
“Our goal is never just to make pretty pictures, but to make cinema, which to both of us is something really different than making pretty pictures,” Kershaw says. “It’s making an image that transmits a feeling.”
Gaucho Gaucho has been expanding across the globe at a brisk clip.
“We had our premiere in Buenos Aires about a week and a half ago, and it was great. Gauchos came there. A full house,” Dweck says. “Cinépolis, they love the film, and so now we’re in their theaters — we have all of Argentina, Latin America, and all of Mexico. We have 85 theaters in Mexico. And Europe — we have all the markets except Portugal. We’re in Scandinavia, Asia, which is great.”
One of the filmmakers’ most memorable screenings came in August, outdoors, at Locarno.
“We played at the Piazza Grande,” says Kershaw. “It’s on a huge screen in the center piazza and they have an incredible projection… the sound is perfect. They have this amazing audience of just engaged cinephiles. So, it’s 8,000 people that are just there to watch movies and celebrate cinema.”
The documentary is now playing on Jolt.film, a new platform designed to help “great films achieve their full potential for reach and monetization while filmmakers retain ownership, data, and all future rights.”
“We’re being Jolted. Part of what they do is they put an ankle bracelet on you, which we’re not supposed to tell anybody. And if you don’t mention Jolt, you get zinged,” Dweck jokes. “The founder of Jolt is Jim Swartz and he’s also the co-founder of Impact Partners and he has supported our films from the beginning. So, we thought it was a really good opportunity to try it and support them. And they built a really solid team, really smart. Having tech drive an audience to [documentaries], it’s an interesting idea.”
The high tech distribution contrasts with the lives of the gauchos in the documentary. “They travel on horseback, accompanied by their dogs as they move their cattle through landscapes of staggering beauty,” notes a description. “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.”
English (US) ·