TAKING THE REINS

Across the American West, queer, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Americans are taking back the cowboy myth to claim their place in the nation’s story.

DIRECTED BY

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan & Sally Rubin

TAKING THE REINS is a poetic, feature-length documentarythat reimagines one of America’s oldest myths through the eyes of those once left out of it.

Set across deserts, dance halls, and rodeo arenas, the film follows a diverse cast of artists, riders, and dreamers who are reclaiming the cowboy as a symbol of freedom and belonging.

Through lyrical vignettes, archival fragments, and striking imagery, the film reveals how the cowboy—long a figure of conquest and masculinity—has become a site of reinvention, resistance, and identity.

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IN PRODUCTION

Now in mid-production, the project has received early support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Idaho Humanities, California Humanities, Mountainfilm, Chapman University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The cowboy rides again, reimagined by those once excluded from the myth of America.

MEET THE TEAM

We are excited to tell this timely story and confident that we’re the best filmmakers to tell it, given our deep personal connections to the project’s central themes. Sally has worked in rural spaces for three decades. She has made three films in Appalachia and one on the U.S./Mexico border, and in each she has studied American, rural, and working-class identity. Her film, HILLBILLY, dealt with stereotypes and media representation of rural folks, looking at how politicians have co-opted rural identities–a theme central to TAKING THE REINS. Sally’s last film, MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE, dealt with gender identity–also a central theme of our film. Kristy, a Latina filmmaker, has a body of work around representation, sexuality, and the entertainment industry, including BODY PARTS, which looks at the making of sex scenes in Hollywood, and WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES, which traces the icon as it was shaped by popular culture. She has worked with migrant communities in urban and border contexts in her films ÁGUILAS and EL CORRIDO DE CECILIA RIOS.


  • Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose bold, genre-defying work explores gender, power, and cultural mythologies. Her films have screened at Tribeca, SXSW, Sundance, and Hot Docs, and aired on Starz, BBC, and PBS. Her feature Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013) examines the legacy of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon. What Happened to Her (2016), a forensic look at the dead woman trope in film, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Dallas International Film Festival. Águilas (2021), about volunteers searching for missing migrants in the borderlands, was picked up by The New Yorker and shortlisted for an Academy Award. Her latest feature, Body Parts (2022), reveals the hidden labor behind sex scenes in Hollywood and streams on Starz and BBC Storyville. After Roe fell, she co-founded the Abortion Clinic Film Collective. Her short within the collective, As Long As We Can (2024), premiered at DC/DOX. She’s now in production on Taking the Reins, a documentary about how marginalized Americans are reclaiming the cowboy archetype. Her work has been supported by NEH, ITVS, Sundance, Fork Films, and Latino Public Broadcasting. Guevara-Flanagan is Professor of Documentary at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, where she leads the MFA program in Documentary.

  • Bryan Donnell is an award-winning director of photography who has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his verité work on an episode of “Intervention,” which won a Primetime Emmy. He won the Palme d'Or for best short at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. One of his first documentaries, the short Undesirables, won both an Emmy and Oscar in the student categories. He regularly works on Academy-Award nominated teams, including with Lucy Walker and Morgan Spurlock on his award-winning CNN series “Inside Man.” He has worked on projects all over the world for ESPN, HBO, Nat Geo, A&E, History, Discovery, OWN, Fox, MSNBC, Sundance, Lifetime, and Animal Planet. Guevara-Flanagan and Rubin will collaborate with Donnell to develop the visual language and style of the film, taking into account the wide-range of aesthetic possibilities that best demonstrate a photographic style that is thoughtful, balanced, analytical, and representative of the diverse landscapes and communities of the American West.

  • Sally Rubin is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and professor. They recently completed a commissioned piece for the Smithsonian, APPALACHIAN FUTURES. In 2021, they released the animated documentary, MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE, which has screened at festivals around the world, including Outfest, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and MountainFilm, and was awarded a Perspective Fund Impact grant and a Project Hatched Chicken and Egg grant. Rubin’s past work includes directorial credits such as HILLBILLY, THE LAST MOUNTAIN, DEEP DOWN, and LIFE ON THE LINE, which have streamed/broadcast on Hulu, Netflix, Independent Lens, Al Jazeera, and PBS. They has done producing, writing, and editing on films that have aired on Frontline, HBO, and the Sundance Channel. Rubin has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Fledgling Fund, among others. Their films have screened at top festivals including the LA Film Festival, DOC NYC, Big Sky, and the American Documentary Showcase. A graduate of Stanford’s documentary program, Rubin is a judge for the Emmy Awards, the International Documentary Awards, and a proudly out, queer, tenured professor at Chapman University.

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