Badal & Inshallah
Inshallah is a Danish doc about a Dane who is Muslim, choses to wear a headscarf and so can't get a job. It was extremely well done. I hope it is widely shown in Denmark. The doc really illustrates how the 'foreigners' in Denmark really live like Danes - they speak Danish in the privacy of their own home, they eat Danish style meals, they use candles to create hygge. But they chose to practice their faith in secular Denmark. It was an excellent examination of a challenge in Danish society to truly include immigrants into the country without requiring assimilation.
Badal was about a marriage tradition in Palestine of marrying sisters and brothers in one family to those in another family. As the doc develops, its clear that badal is used to marry off girls by leveraging the inherent value of the 'boy' child. It also showed the contradictions of a country like Palestine where those with progressive and traditional beliefs live side by side.
Heavy Metal Jr & Beyond Beats: A HipHop Head Weighs In On Manhood in the HipHop Culture
Highly recommended. Both docs are good. Heavy Metal Jr. follows a young heavy metal band trying to make it in Scotland. Losing a bass player is tough but the band pulls together for their big act.
Beyond Beats was a great examination of hip hop culture. I am tired of having conversations with people who say they don't like hip hop or rap except they listen to music that uses elements from both. Beyond Beats looks at hip hop from the perspective of someone who identifies it as their own music but is tired of the gangsta image. The doc becomes really interesting when it starts to look at how much hip hop is consumed by White audiences and how it became more and more gangsta when the small labels (ie. Def Jam Records) got bought by the big labels (CBS Records). After watching Rize and now this doc, I am more convinced than ever that we are in a peak of hip hop and something new is about to emerge.
The Duckling
I was unsure of this doc but I wanted to see at least one from Japan, one of this year's featured countries. At times The Duckling seemed like the video diary of a typical 20 year old, slightly lost and largely self absorbed. However, at other times it was a brilliant investigation into self-discovery. It is sometimes brave as well as the film maker decides to confront each of her family members with their emotional affect on her as she grew up. Her parents for example sent her at 5 years old to a kindergarten for one year where she had to live away from home in a rural and natural environment. It came out during the Q&A that this was a trend in Japanese society when it went through its rapid economic growth in the '80's.