Three gauchos on horseback gallop across an Argentine landscape, their connection to their animals and their surroundings palpable. In a crumbling church, an elderly gaucho confers with a parish priest, worried that his life has lost its meaning. A young girl risks injury to become part of the gaucho tradition.
Moments like these make up Gaucho Gaucho, a documentary from the team of Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw and finalist for the 2024 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award. Shot over several years in remote mountain villages, the movie offers a glimpse into a way of life in danger of disappearing.
Dweck and Kershaw previously collaborated on The Last Race (2018) and The Truffle Hunters (2020). Their work is marked by an empathy with their subjects and attention to details––qualities missing from too many documentaries.
Following its Sundance Film Festival premiere at the beginning of the year, Gaucho Gaucho screened at the Morelia Film Festival, introduced by Dweck. He and Kershaw later spoke with The Film Stage on a Zoom call ahead of the film’s December 1 premiere on Jolt.
The Film Stage: How did you discover this community?
Michael Dweck: I started to travel to Argentina back in the early ’90s because my wife is Argentine. I began early on to photograph gauchos. Gregory has been working on a lot of films in that same area of Latin America. We started to talk about a project after The Truffle Hunters. Gauchos seemed to be a likely subject because the culture had the ingredients that we look for: a community rich in tradition, one that’s close to nature and close to animals.
The challenge was to find a community that was independent. We looked at communities in the south and Patagonia, but they were largely isolated sheepherders. We looked at Corrientes on the East Coast, a beautiful region. The gauchos there are in water all the time, so they ride barefoot, with beautiful leather straps around their toes and ankles. But the landscape was flat. It didn’t lend itself to exciting imagery.
So we ended up in the Salta region, which was mountainous and beautiful. We found an independent community, meaning they didn’t work for anybody. That’s where the “gaucho gaucho” idea comes from. Lots of people in Argentina dress like gauchos. But a “gaucho gaucho” is somebody tuned into the pulse of traditions, folklore, dances, spirituality. And they have their own cattle.
How long were you with them?
Gregory Kershaw: We made the film over a two-year period, during which we took 11 different trips to the community. The way we make films requires a lot of time. Two years is actually the fastest we’ve worked. Truffle Hunters took three years. It takes so much time because we’re centered on the people we’re filming. We don’t start the process with a story. We have no idea what the film will be about other than our curiosity about this community and the mythology of the gaucho.
Did you have a sense of who gauchos were before you started? Did your ideas about them change?
Kershaw: The mythology of the gaucho is similar to the mythology of the American West. They’re very aware of the American Western––they know who John Ford is, who John Wayne is. There’s something interesting about going to a community that has a preexisting mythology. That propels a lot of our filmmaking, to go to places where there is a larger idea of what it is, but then try to enter into it with as blank a slate as possible.
You have scenes in the film where they are discussing what it means to be a gaucho.
Dweck: True, they do. I think the difference we noticed between the cowboy and the gaucho is that the American West is about conquest and the Argentine gaucho is really about freedom. They want to be free. It’s ingrained in the mythology of the gaucho. That’s why they proudly wear these clothes that are handmade or handed down to them. Everything has a symbolic meaning, a story behind it. Their stirrups might be five generations old. The core of what we were looking for, what we tried to show in the film, is this idea of freedom. How do you express that? How do you use cinema to show freedom to an audience?
You concentrate on roughly a half-dozen characters. How did you choose the people to focus on?
Dweck: Early on it was very difficult to get to know them because, in general, they don’t speak a lot. The communities are very private and they don’t know much about America or Americans. It wasn’t until we became almost part of their families that we got to know them. It took us, I’d say, four or five months to really integrate ourselves.
Kershaw: Once you’re in these locations, you start asking around. Certain names kept coming up. People mentioned Mario Choque or “Tati” Gonza. When we visited them, we realized they were community leaders, that they’ve held on to the gaucho culture. We started spending time with them––a lot of asados. A lot of time in the fields. They put us on horses, tested us with some really long rides.
Dweck: Once we gained their trust, everything changed. What happened was we turned the camera viewfinder around and showed them how beautiful their lives were, how heroic. All of a sudden they weren’t subjects in front of a camera. All of a sudden we were working together.
Kershaw: It’s really only after that that we start filming. By that point we deeply understand who they are. They’re comfortable with us, they can reveal what’s happening in their lives, which will eventually become stories in the film.
Did some figures stand out to you?
Kershaw: It’s different for every person we follow. Like the first time we met Wally [Flores], he told us the story about protecting his baby calves from condors. But he lives on a mountain that’s on top of another mountain––a really hard place to get to. It took us a whole day to get there, driving from the nearest village. The condors attacking his cattle was a symptom of a world gone mad, one that has fallen into chaos. We found that fascinating. It was the kind of story we’re interested in exploring.
Other stories took a really long time for us to understand. Like Solano and Jony [Ávalos], the father and son. At first we were amazed that they were mirror images of each other. They looked the same, dressed the same, moved the same. It wasn’t until much later in the process that we realized the tension in their story, that Jony would be going to school and not be able to spend as much time with his father.
When did you decide to make this black-and-white?
Dweck: Early on in the process, the weeks we spend getting to know the people, we’ll take our camera and shoot tests. We tested dealing with movement and color, things like that. Because the landscapes were so grand, we thought a wide aspect ratio would be perfect. The textures were so rich––the stones, the shrubs, these beautiful, worn clay cliffs. The area felt timeless to us. it could have been the 1940s, the 1950s. We wanted the audience to feel the same way. When we turned our viewfinder to black-and-white, what we called “beauty scope,” everything felt right. There was a creaminess to the color grade.
You spoke before about using a zoom lens instead of prime lenses.
Dweck: We started with primes, but in that environment there’s so much dust that you didn’t want to be switching lenses. You can’t get dust on the sensor. Arri gave us the first zoom for this camera, a 24 to 75 mm zoom.
How do you compose your frames?
Kershaw: It goes back to that idea of intuition. Exploring locations. We spend so much time before we film. We don’t just arrive, pull out the camera, and start shooting. We spend a lot of time sitting, feeling the location. Once you hit it, it’s clear. It’s a discovery process of looking through the viewfinder. It’s also about the light. We usually wait until the end of the day, or very early in the day before the hard sunlight comes out. Or we wait for clouds, which are actually extremely rare in this area. Anytime there was a cloud we were figuring out something to shoot. And then of course what’s happening in front of the camera. Because it’s not just looking for something beautiful––it’s always about what the frame is telling that will transmit some feeling to the audience.
You say it’s intuitive, but how do you both intuit the same thing?
Dweck: We’ve been working together now for 16 years. It’s kind of seamless at this point. I’ll give you an example: one of our producers came to Salta to visit for a couple of weeks; later he told our other funders, “It’s strange. They don’t say anything at all when they’re shooting. It just seems to happen.”
I mean, we have a very similar aesthetic. We know the characters really well because we’re always with them. It’s like Gregory says, when it works, it works. A lot of times we were in someone’s house in Salta, walls made of mud and straw, sometimes no windows. It’s very challenging. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. We’ll ask, “What are you doing later?” We have to look for other opportunities.
I’m sorry to geek-out here, but tell me how you got the shot of Guada riding her horse up into the canyon.
Kershaw: We knew Guada brought her horse to this canyon, always through this stream. We went there with her a week or so before we were going to shoot. We explored different shots. On the day we shot, we knew she was going to be coming up that way. We had a few shots we wanted to get. Usually we get just one or two shots a day; we got quite a few with her because there was so much to film there. We had a really clear idea of what we wanted. When she’s there, we hopefully get it in the can.
At what point does music become part of the process?
Dweck: We collect music all along. We create playlists early on, even before we start to shoot. We had a couple hundred sound references. Sometimes we’d say, “How great would this shot of Guada be with opera?” Then we’ll share that with our editor, Gabriel Rhodes.
Kershaw: We’re never trying to create an emotion with music or underscore an emotion we wished was there.
With the traveling shots, the music adds this monumental feeling. Talk about the camera car you used for those.
Kershaw: It was like a Mad Max car. Normally Michael and I work with a very small crew. But for those shots, we brought a camera car from Buenos Aires up to these mountaintop communities. One shot, we were following a dirt road. But most of the time we were out in the desert or on dry grass. We did a number on that car. It broke down on the side of a mountain once.
Gaucho Gaucho will screen theatrically in key cities in the U.S., and will be available to stream on Jolt beginning December 1. It will also release theatrically in Mexico, South America, Europe, and Asia before becoming available to watch on Jolt and other platforms in those regions.