Holy Cowboy (WIP)
Length: 8 min
Genre:
Magical realism, drama
Themes:
Identity, community and ecology
Audience:
Festivals, late teens and up
Could become a special.
Budget:
~$37,000
Logline: A nameless figure encounters an elusive old bicycle and begins the painful process of becoming a cowboy.
Synopsis:
While riding through the woods, a nameless figure encounters what seems to be an elusive old bicycle. As they ride it, a painful process begins: they are on their way to becoming a cowboy.
What begins as observation gradually becomes dissolution and transformation: the boundaries between the human body and the animal body blur, merge, and destabilize.
The ancient bike: The velocipede is one of the earlier forms of what we now know as the bicycle. In it’s early days, people would avoid riding it because it made them look like a horse.
Director Statement
The film draws on the lingering cultural figure of the cowboy — a solitary mediator between wilderness, order and aspirational figure — and places that figure into a contemporary ecological and existential frame. Traditionally imagined as standing between untamed land and emerging civilization, we explore an inversion of the myth: untamed civilization and re-enchantment of the land. The cowboy, historically tied to narratives of frontier expansion and territorial conquest, is here reimagined as a threshold figure. Rather than mastering the landscape, the protagonist dissolves into it. The figure of the cowboy we expect out of a Western is replaced by a literal cow-boy. The film moves through states of leaving structure, entering uncertainty, and confronting the unknown, exploring diaphanous borders between life and death, self and other, personhood and non-personhood, and suggesting transformation as an alternative to conquest
Stills
Directed by Ignacio Betancourt
Sound Design by Daniel Majer