>>REVIEW
REBEL MUSIC AMERICAS
DIRECTED BY Marie Boti and Malcom Guy
Wednesday, July 19
Uptown Screen
To lose oneself in rhythmic beats is primal and keystone to the survival and sanity of our species. Music unites, encourages, inspires and consoles, simultaneously serving as both a form of expression and reflection. Throughout history, where all else failed, music alone served as deity to societies, races and individuals struggling with the harsh realities of their existence. But, through that same course of history, music, like all art forms, has also borne the rise of its commoditization.
Enter Rebel Music Americas, a new film by independent documentary filmmakers Marie Boti and Malcolm Guy that delves into the socially and politically-charged contemporary music reverberating throughout South America.
Cleanly divided into four segments, the film exposes us to the music and anti-American/globalization philosophies of four groups of musicians from four different South American countries. There's the strained and pleading voices of a community of Afro-Columbians who have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the name of development, a successful Mexican-American singer-songwriter who tells of the struggles of women and indigenous people trying to outlast poverty in her homeland, an Argentinean duo who play to the support of unemployed workers picketing a refinery in Buenos Aires and, lastly, a high-profile Brazilian musician who throws his support behind the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), an incredibly inspiring organization of peasants who protest Brazil’s "land grab" by building their own communities on unused government land.
There is a sterile quality to this film, with little attempt being made to connect the four separate segments and no arc present in any of the stories or in the film as a whole. One doesn't know whether to criticize or praise it for this complete lack of manufactured tension. But, there is no question that these filmmakers deserve praise for the level of intimacy achieved with all those put before the lens. It is rare in these days of manufactured reality that a documentary should feel so legitimately real.
Most unfortunate, however, is the focus on the commercially-successful musicians, a move that feels hypocritical and dilutes the film’s overall impact. The real story here is of those who embrace music as a necessity, not as a commodity. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.