outskirts of Argentine Pampas, an ethnographic visual documentary

One of the directors of this documentary, Michael Dweck, is a renowned American visual artist who made a name for his narrative photography. In recent years, he ventured into film direction alongside cinematographer Gregory Kershaw. Notably, their collaboration also led to the film "The Truffle Hunters," which earned a nomination at Sundance and won the Best Documentary Director award from the Directors Guild of America in 2021.

Crafted by accomplished photographers, the movies inevitably feature their unique aesthetics and often place narrative in the backdrop of their distinctive visual style. The latest work, "Gaucho Gaucho," appears more like an ethnographic visual documentary. However, the meticulous cinematography elevates the technical quality of this documentary far beyond the anthropological works that seemed untouched by editing and thus match the rawness of their subject matters.

As the title suggests, the documentary revolves around the local people known as the Gaucho that reside in the Calchaquí Valley of the Salta Province on the outskirts of Argentine Pampas. There’s a prevailing belief that the traditional culture in remote areas cannot withstand the tide of globalization and modernization. However, perhaps due to aesthetic of the documentary authors, we can see in the film an extremely steadfast conservativeness against it among the Gaucho people, especially among the youth.

A high school girl, disregarding the school's dress code, insists on wearing the traditional Gaucho attire and spends much time on local rodeo events. A boy, chopping wood on the farm with his father while sipping mate tea, holds a firm belief in his future, declaring, "I will become a Gaucho cowboy." Another two young boys assemble weathered bones into the semblance of a horse, cherishing its former glory without concerning themselves with its possible demise.

Years pass on along the arid plains; the witches continue their divinations of fate, the horses gallop as time passes by, and people thrive in the companionship of familiar neighbors.