Woopaa
2022 · 8m · USA
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Champion bucking bull Woopaa and rider Jose Vitor Leme form a rare partnership, making their marks and setting records that may stand for years.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Look, I get it—man and beast, mythic bond, blah blah—but Woopaa leans hard into the sports-doc reverence game everyone else is playing, and there's nothing here that subverts the formula or makes me question why I'm watching a bull and a rider instead of, say, the rot underneath the sport itself.
Woopaa situates itself in the grand tradition of animal-human partnership cinema—the mythic register of the footage, the contemplative pacing, the way it treats an 8-minute runtime like an elegiac portrait—marks this as a film aware of its own place in documentary lineage, with the formal restraint to let that mythology breathe.
The singular choice here is the sound design: the way ambient arena noise drops away to isolate Woopaa's breath and hooffall creates an almost meditative intimacy that elevates what could've been routine sports footage into something genuinely intimate, and that decision does the heavy lifting on an minimal budget.