Caballerango - 2018
In Caballerango (Horse Wrangler), members of a family in the Mexican state of Jalisco reflect on a young man’s disappearance under the watchful eyes of the horse who saw him last.
– edited by Isidore Bethel (and production consulting) with Ilana Coleman and Sebastián Salfate / directed by Juan Pablo González / produced by Makena Buchanan, Ilana Coleman, and Jamie Gonçalves
– 62 minutes, Sin Sitio Cine, Grasshopper Film, MUBI
– Best Feature Film from Jalisco at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, Best Feature Documentary & Best Cinematography at the Tacoma Film Festival, Special Jury Award at the Dallas International Film Festival, IDFA, True/False Film Festival, Full Frame Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, FICUNAM, Camden International Film Festival, DocumentaMadrid, Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Dokufest, Boston Latino International Film Festival, Docu al parque (Guadalajara)
– with support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, Uruguay’s DocMontevideo Rough Cut Lab, National Association of Latino Independent Producers, CalArts, City of Austin Core Cultural Fund, and the Austin Film Society
PRESS:
– The New York Times: “A miracle of nonfiction portraiture.”
– IndieWire: An “evocatively spare, slow-burn documentary spellbinder…Finding stirring poignancy in seemingly quotidian moments, Caballerango is a transcendentally sad and beautiful reflection on vanishing traditions and disappearing lives.”
– DigBoston: “Caballerango is exemplary as a document of human physicality, constantly finding something of its characters’ respective essences through individual positions and gestures…Scenes play out for minutes at a time, always to fruitful ends in terms of both action (which often develops in surprising directions, sometimes even literally, as in one particular “camera movement”) and spectatorship (the form allowing us time to find those details in the frame that reveal a truth which the figures within them dare not speak)…Recording its space with a long and close view alike, framed towards both the cultural and the individual, the visual and the verbal, Caballerango achieves humane portraiture on a vast scale.”
– Sightlines: Caballerango “gives us the freedom and time to take these people on their own terms and explore our feelings about them and their loss.”
– RogerEbert.com: “One of the best films at the [2019 True/False Film] festival…It’s an attempt to inure the audience into the pace of life in Milpillas while also demonstrating how ghosts, metaphoric and literal, permanently disrupt everyday lives.”
– Vox Magazine: “In this film, quiet moments become loud, and loud moments become quiet…By contrasting loud and quiet and going far past what is comfortable, the filmmakers effectively transplant the painful feelings of the Milpillas community into the hearts of the audience and spotlight the magnitude of their tragedy.”
– on IndieWire’s BAMcinemaFest must-see list: The “compositions, the landscape, and the tone of this film conjure an atmosphere and feeling of loss that will haunt you.”
– on Remezcla’s Full Frame must-see list