Gaucho Gaucho wins the inaugural Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award at Locarno Film Festival

Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck have taken home the very first Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival for their documentary Gaucho Gaucho, a celebration of Argentine cowboys and cowgirls.

Community is at the heart of everything we do at Letterboxd—as you know—which makes the celebration of Gaucho Gaucho, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s portrait of Argentina’s close-knit community of cowboys and cowgirls, feel very special. Not least because we got to do it on stage in Locarno’s Piazza Grande, in front of 8,000 people. 

On August 17, Dweck and Kershaw’s film was presented with the very first Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award in partnership with the Locarno Film Festival. The award was voted for by a jury of six young cinephiles led by our London Editor Ella Kemp, who gave the filmmakers their (very heavy!) award. 

“It is a film about community, a beautiful film, a simple film, but also a complex film that can touch you and move you, whether you’re from Mongolia, Hawai’i, Venezuela, London, Paris or Slovakia—and that’s just our jury members. It is a film for everyone,” Kemp said of Gaucho Gaucho on stage. 

Accepting the award, co-director Kershaw said: “It is so incredibly magical to be receiving this award. The screening here had been a dream for us for a very long time.” 

“The thing that was most important to the gaucho identity was this idea of freedom. That was our guiding light while making this film. Our goal, for two years, was to figure out a way to translate what we figured was the freedom we felt into a cinematic experience. To have that received and recognized means the world to us.” 

Dweck added: “This place is a fitting environment for this film. Being under the stars, out in the open air, being close to nature is what the world of the gaucho is about. This is the place they would want the film to be seen. A lot of our heroes have had films here: Rossellini, Tarantino, Welles. We feel incredibly blessed to be part of this family and this world. You’ve created a temple of cinema, and a safe space for filmmakers to show the true art of cinema—and that’s what we strive to do in our work.” 

Gaucho Gaucho is yet to receive global distribution—stay tuned on release dates, and add it to your watchlist now. And rewatch the pair’s previous film, The Truffle Hunters, in the meantime!