I Am John Wayne
2011 · 17m · United States
Directed by Christina Choe
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, western
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young urban cowboy named Taco, grieving the death of his best friend, skips the funeral and instead honors his friend by taking his favorite horse out for a ride.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief film that could've been maudlin funeral-skipping sentiment, but Choe finds something genuinely perverse in the logic—honoring the dead through absence and a horse ride instead of ritual feels almost subversive, though it's restrained enough that most people will miss the edge.
Choe's restraint here is formally precise: the western backdrop becomes a space for introspection rather than spectacle, positioning the film within a lineage of elegiac indie drama that trusts silence and landscape over exposition.
That choice to make the horse—not dialogue, not the funeral, not memory—the emotional anchor of the whole piece: one committed decision about what object carries the friendship, and suddenly a familiar grief narrative becomes singular and specific to Taco.