Taking the Reins, Documentary Feature
Taking the Reins is a feature-length documentary that examines the unique figure of the “cowboy” in the world’s popular imagination, exploring the ways in which marginalized Americans – often cast out of national narratives – are reinventing and redeploying performances of “cowboy” to demand inclusion in our country’s story. From a gay rodeo in Texas, to a Black horse ranch in Compton, Los Angeles, to a woman who reenacts Calamity Jane for tourists, our film explores the enduring hold that the cowboy archetype has on global culture, its complex dimensions, and its reclamation by communities to whom it originally belonged. Taking the Reins aims to expand our understanding of a foundational part of American experience and self-identity, that of the urban and rural cowboy, as well as to chart the ways in which a rural iconography of masculinity percolates into and out of a larger urban, American, and even international experience.
Image (1886) Photo of Tejana Cowgirl in Apache dress, public domain.
People
Kristy Guevara Flanagan
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is a Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television where she heads the MFA Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with an experimental film about a blow-up doll. Her first feature, GOING ON 13 (2009), covers four years in the lives of four adolescent girls; it premiered at Tribeca and was broadcast on PBS. Her feature, WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN HEROINES (2012), traces the evolution of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. The film garnered numerous awards, premiered at SXSW and was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens. Her short, WHAT HAPPENED TO HER (2016) – about the prevalence of images of dead women on screen – premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian Film Festival, where it received an honorable mention for best short. More recently, Kristy completed the experimental feature, MOTHERTIME (2018), a diaristic portrait in parenting, and the documentary short, AGUILAS (2021), which follows a group of volunteers searching for missing migrants along the US/Mexico border. ÁGUILAS was short listed for the Motion Picture Academy’s Best Short Documentary. Her last feature film BODY PARTS, about the making of sex scenes in Hollywood, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (2022) and streams on Starz and the BBC’s Storyville. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.
