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Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in March 2024 and has since been updated to include new distribution details for “Gaucho Gaucho.”

Landing a good distributor is the holy grail for every indie filmmaker at Sundance. But when it comes to documentaries, while Netflix picked up a few titles out of the festival this year, the market remains soft.

Even as the theatrical market has improved for Oscar nominees and winners like “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things,” it’s tough to find a buyer for a lot of movies these days. For a movie like “Gaucho Gaucho,” which earned a Sundance jury prize and played well at Cph:dox, the filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw finally landed a distributor at online company Jolt.film, which is also releasing another difficult-to-place documentary, producer Alex Gibney and director Alexis Bloom’s “The Bibi Files.”

Cinematographer Kershaw and photographer Dweck first met years...

“The Bibi Files,” a documentary about Benjamin Netanyahu that features never-before-seen video of the Israeli Prime Minister being interrogated by police on corruption allegations that led to his indictment in 2019, will be available to stream on Jolt.film beginning Dec. 11.

In September, Netanyahu attempted to block “The Bibi Files” from premiering at the Toronto Film Festival. The doc, directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, ultimately screened at the fest hours after a Jerusalem court rejected Netanyahu’s suit, which claimed that the film violated Israeli law by making use of unapproved interrogation footage.

Given its political nature “The Bibi Files,” not surprisingly, did not sell to any major streamers following the doc’s Sept. 9 TIFF debut. Bloom and Gibney ultimately decided to bring the film to Jolt, a direct-to-consumer film distribution platform that launched in March with Ross Kauffman’s documentary “Of Medicine and Miracles.

"Stunningly beautiful." Indeed.

Bringing a pristine level of craft with their portraits of subcultures in The Last Race and The Truffle Hunters, Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck turned their vision to the world of gauchos for their latest project. Returning to Sundance Film Festival for a third time earlier this year, Gaucho Gaucho beautifully captures this particular way of life in Argentina. Now set for screenings at LA’s AFI Fest on October 23, Doc NYC on Nov. 16 & 18, and more, followed by a streaming release on Jolt beginning December 1, the first trailer and poster have arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Gaucho Gaucho paints an Argentinian Western with image and sound that reach an operatic beauty. Acclaimed photographers and now three-time Sundance-fêted filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck return with another striking nonfiction work after first taking audiences to the final stock car racetrack of Long Island with The Last Race and the secret corners...

Predicting the winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar becomes a lot easier on December 17 when the academy announces the 15 films that make the shortlist. Those semi-finalists will be culled from the more than 100 titles that qualified this year for consideration. (Scroll down for the most up-to-date 2025 Oscar predictions for Best Documentary Feature.)

To winnow those down to a manageable number, the academy adds newly eligible documentary feature to a virtual screening room available to all 500-plus members of the documentary branch. While all members are encouraged to watch as many of these as they can, one-fifth of the voters are assigned each title. Each branch member will submit a preferential ballot listing their top 15 choices.

All of these ballots are collated to determine the 15 semi-finalists. Branch members are then encouraged to watch films on that list which they haven’t seen yet before casting another preferential ballot with their top five choices.

Das Festivalpublikum von Locarno77 wählte den schweizerisch-peruanischen Film „Reinas“ von Klaudia Reynicke zu seinem Favoriten. Den Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award erhielt ein Dokumentarfilm.

„Reinas” (Credit: Alva Film, Inicia Films, Maretazo Cine

Mit der Bekanntgabe des Publikumspreises, ausgewählt aus dem Programm der Pizza Grande, und des Gewinners der Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award sind nun alle Preise des Locarno Film Festival vergeben. Der Prix du Public, seit über 20 Jahren gestiftet von der Ubs, geht an „Reinas“ von der schweizerisch-peruanischen Filmemacherin Klaudia Reynicke. Der Film feierte bereits auf der Berlinale in der Reihe Generationen Weltpremiere und erzählt von einer peruanischen Mutter, die mit ihren Töchtern in den 1990er Jahren beschließt, in die USA auszuwandern. Der Film befindet sich auch in der Vorauswahl um die Entscheidung, welcher Film die Schweiz im Oscarrennen vertreten wird.

Den Letterboxd Piazza Grande gewann der Dokumentarfilm „Gaucho Gaucho“ Michael Dweck und Gregory Kershaw. Über den Preis entschied eine Jury junger Filmkritiker,...

It has to be among the best open-air public spaces at any festival to premiere a film and it also counts as a safe space for some world premiere screenings. Included in the Piazza Grande section, the folks that fill up the 8,000 seats will find a mix of world premieres, Swiss preems and so polished-off older films. Sundance preemed Gaucho Gaucho by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw will be nice to take in in the great outdoors and so will Tarsem Singh‘s The Fall (Restored Cut). On the world premieres side Simon Jaquemet‘s Electric Child in finally complete – filmed in October 2022 this is about a couple whose child develops an unusual illness.…...

Taking place August 7-17, the official selection for the 77th Locarno Film Festival has been unveiled, featuring a stellar-looking slate of highly anticipated films. Highlights include Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year, By the Stream, starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee; Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney, Wang Bing’s second part of his Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), as well as new films by Radu Jude, Bertrand Mandico, Courtney Stephens, Ben Rivers, Gürcan Keltek, Denis Côté, Kevin Jerome Everson, Fabrice Du Welz (featuring Abel Ferrara!), and many more. Also of particular note is the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored cut of The Fall, which features a slightly different edit as he recently noted.

Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival said, “We are very excited and happy with our selection for Locarno’s 77th edition, which we believe...

Paris-based sales house Charades has acquired international sales rights to Argentinian Western-Inspired documentary “Gaucho Gaucho” which earned a Sundance Jury Prize in January and recently played at Cph:dox.

Directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the duo behind the box office hit ‘The Truffle Hunters,’ “Gaucho Gaucho” explores the story of a community of cowboys and cowgirls in Northern Argentina living outside of the modern world.

Produced by Dweck and Kershaw for Beautiful Stories Productions, the film is shot in black-and-white and celebrates the beauty and passion of a group of skilled Argentine cowboys and cowgirls, known as gauchos.

“Gaucho Gaucho” has been praised international critics, including Variety’ Guy Lodge who described the film as a “perfectly framed,” “loving, visually resplendent documentary” that “gives the Argentine cowboy community ample space to bond and merge.”

Charades’ co-founder Carole Baraton said the company was “very proud to bring this special masterpiece from...

“Gaucho Gaucho” opens on a pristinely framed, lushly monochromatic shot of something that can only, at first glance, be described as an unidentified lying object. On a flat expanse of matted grassland, under a rolling widescreen canvas of sky, the camera centers a large, dark clump of what may be rock, earth or animal matter. Eventually it stirs, revealing the folds of its composition. A man rises from his slumber, clad in high boots, wide-brimmed hat and layers of hard-wearing fabric; then a horse’s head emerges from the mass, shaking and snorting and returning awkwardly to its feet. It’s an apt visual representation of the close kinship between human life, animal life and landscape that defines the Argentine cowboy community; in frame after perfectly composed frame, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s loving, visually resplendent documentary gives them ample space to bond and merge.

When it comes to...

Sundance documentaries are alive and well. And it looks like there’s some acquisition action this year, too. Which Sundance documentaries have the best shot at landing in Oscar contention this year? It helps to get bought early or to have an international footprint.

A rickety theatrical market for non-fiction features and a dwindling number of active documentary buyers meant that many Sundance 2023 films did not get picked up for distribution, or met serious delays before companies came through. As the top American film festival for docs, Sundance usually supplies as many as four out of the final five Oscar nominees each year.

And usually, by late summer, Oscar promotion is well underway. But last year, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which was rumored to be an HBO Documentary Films pickup for months, wasn’t announced until August 29, when other Sundance grads had been campaigning all summer.

One...

Following the success of The Truffle Hunters, which showed all it takes to make a subject interesting is to approach it with curiosity and openness to wonder, directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw are back with Gaucho Gaucho, a stunningly beautiful chronicle of an Argentine gaucho community who closely follow the rules and traditions of their culture, despite time and progress.

Their unique attire and the allure of legends about their courage and strength turned them into defining symbols of Argentina––as well as parts of Uruguay and Brazil––where they mastered the art of horseriding and working with cattle. Like their analogs in other cultures, these cowboys came to signal different values based on the gazer. They represented ideals of masculinity and simplicity as easily as they could be seen as outlaws and fugitives who sought the safety of the plains and mountains, the way pirates hid in open oceans.

The 40th edition of Sundance proved that despite corporate consolidation, there is still a market for independently made documentaries. While there haven’t been many sales so far, there has been strong buyer interest in two celeb-focused docs — “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” and “Will & Harper,” featuring Will Ferrell — and healthy interest in others.

“The market didn’t have a pulse six months ago,” says Submarine Entertainment sales agent Josh Braun, who came to the festival with nine documentaries seeking distribution, including “Daughters,” “Gaucho Gaucho” and “Union.” “So there was a reason to be a little bit fearful coming into Sundance. But now we are feeling a pulse. We are heading in a good direction. The patient still needs some treatment, but we are no longer in a Doa situation.”

While Submarine has not yet closed deals for any of the titles, Braun is optimistic, given the fact a...

The Sundance Film Festival welcomed a new class of indie film stars on Friday, handing out its annual awards in Park City, Utah.

Taking the festival’s grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition was “In the Summers” from writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio. The film tells of two daughters who come of age navigating a turbulent but loving father during yearly visits to his home in New Mexico. “Porcelain War” won the U.S. Documentary competition, for its portrait of artists-turned-soldiers in the Ukraine.

Top prizes in the world cinematic category went to “A New Kind of Wilderness” for documentary, the tale of a wild-living family who must return to the modern world after an untimely death; “Sujo” won for narrative feature, about a 4-year-old orphan who may find it impossible to escape a future working for a drug cartel.

Incoming Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez began...

“Presence,” a twisty new thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has sold to Neon.

The movie, which is directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh, puts an inventive spin on the haunted house genre. It unfolds from the perspective of the spectral entity and is primarily interested in dramatizing the issues of the people living in the home, who seem to be grappling with a lot of interpersonal problems.

“I wanted to find a different way to tell the story,” Soderbergh told Variety in a recent profile. “Everything is revealed through the glimpses of this family that this presence sees. And the whole ghost genre element is a Trojan horse to show a group of people in danger of falling apart.”

The market at Sundance has been slower than usual, with deals taking longer to hammer out — that’s a sign of how challenging the box office has become for indie pictures.

Within minutes following the opening fade-in of “Gaucho Gaucho,” a trio of individuals can be seen dashing across a barren landscape, each sitting astride their own majestic-looking horse bathed in a sea of black and white with a South American backdrop beautifully framing the moment. It’s an appropriate setup to this documentary about gauchos, the colloquialism used to describe Argentinian cowboys and cowgirls, as the 84-minute runtime serves as little more than an exercise in striking photography mixed with a series of vignettes that’s as slice of life as one’s likely to find.

Continue reading ‘Gaucho Gaucho’ Review: A Beautiful But Aimless Slice Of Argentinian Cowboy Life [Sundance] at The Playlist.

No strangers to Sundance, filmmaker/cinematographer Gregory Kershaw and filmmaker/visual artist Michael Dweck are back for this 40th edition with their latest unsurprisingly cinematic, nonfiction study “Gaucho Gaucho.” While the acclaimed duo’s previous docs were set at a Long Island racetrack and in the Italian countryside, respectively, “Gaucho Gaucho” is an “Argentinean Western” (according to the Sundance synopsis) that takes place in the remote plains of that faraway, South American land. And therein lies the rub.

On the upside, “Gaucho Gaucho” is exquisitely crafted, with sumptuous black-and-white cinematography, camera angles framed askew, and eye-catching slo-mo sequences. (Cowboys atop galloping horses makes for one heart-pounding mix.) Not to mention an operatic — at times literally — score. (And Los Gatos’s “La Balsa” is an ear worm for sure.) And yet this heavily stylized, and often overly staged, approach actually ends up overwhelming the story the North American filmmakers have supposedly...

“Gaucho Gaucho” marks the third documentary Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw have debuted at Sundance and the second film that they have made that plunges viewers into a remote, yet enchanting world. Their 2020 acclaimed doc “The Truffle Hunters” followed a handful of men in Piedmont, Italy, in the search for rare and expensive white Alba truffles. In “Gaucho Gaucho,” the duo explore the lives of a group of skilled Argentine cowboys and cowgirls, known as gauchos.

Using stunning black-and-white cinematography, “Gaucho Gaucho” captures older generations of gauchos who dispense their wisdom, while also following a new generation who fight to continue their families’ legacies in a modern world.

It took two years to film and edit the 143 shots featured in the 85-minute doc.

Variety spoke to Dweck and Kershaw ahead of the film’s Jan. 19 premiere.

How did you manage to gain the trust of a very small, very tight Argentinian community?...