In the film The Cowboys, Julie Chaffort has defined a slow pace, the pace of time being stretched in the torpor of a scorching sun in the American desert, and also the pace of the everyday lives of the handicapped people she films. By creating a very open setting, in which everyone plays their own character, alone or with several others, the director enables the real lives of her actors to find their way into the film. Her characters are themselves and, at the same time, other people. They happily get involved in disguises, incarnating the cowboys and cowgirls whom they have possibly dreamed of being. And what they instill of their own lives in their characters, so at odds with what one might expect of “real” fake cowboys (because we often only know them through films), suddenly seems spot on.  Camille De Singly