Untouchable
2024 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Lucas Dabrowski
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tense
Shot on 16mm Kodak film stock, this documentary immerses the viewer in bull riding culture, following riders Bret Timmermans and Isaak Siemens as they pursue eight seconds of perfection against 1,500-pound bulls across the rodeo circuit. The film captures both the explosive arena moments and the sacrifice and loneliness of life on the road.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Shooting rodeo on 16mm is a formal argument — it insists this sport is a death ritual, not entertainment — and that argument is more interesting than anything happening in the arena.
The inaugural Vimeo Award is proper institutional recognition, and Rausch earned it by treating grief — in its animal-loss register — with the same formal seriousness that the best lyric documentaries bring to human subjects. The restraint is the argument.
Shooting contemporary rodeo on 16mm Kodak turns a modern sport into something ritualistic — that's a deliberate temporal dislocation, not just a vintage flex. Fifteen minutes inside bull riding culture sounds genuinely embodied.