OPENING NIGHT! JARIPEO

** Frameline50 — Audience Award, Best Documentary Feature**

**Provincetown International Film Festival — John Schlesinger Award for Best Documentary Director**

**RiverRun International Film Festival — Best Documentary Feature**

Every Christmas, cowboys, families and returning migrants gather in Michoacán for the jaripeo, a traditional Mexican rodeo steeped in ritual, spectacle and machismo. But just beyond the arena, another story is unfolding. In fleeting touches, knowing glances and secret encounters, queer desire finds its own place within this deeply rooted tradition. Filmmakers Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig take us inside this world with extraordinary intimacy, weaving raw vérité, Super 8 and dreamlike memory into a sensual portrait of queer life, rural Mexico and the complicated pull of home. At once tender, sexy and visually intoxicating, Jaripeo finds beauty in contradiction and freedom in unexpected places, revealing queerness not outside tradition, but alive within it.

OPENING NIGHT IS KINDLY SPONSORED BY STACEY BANAHAN, BRIAN CARR & THOMAS LAPIERRE