I'm very excited to participate once again in this contest by our friend @wiseagent, League of Movies (HIVE WRITING CONTEST): Fourth Edition | Week 02 - "Roots". This week, the task is to talk about a film that was made in your country and I chose Bad Hair (Pelo Malo), a movie that focuses on sexuality and the Venezuelan society.
Bad Hair is a 2013 Venezuelan film written and directed by Mariana Rondón, it's about a little boy named Junior, who has what we call bad hair, this is a term that we use to refer to curly hair similar to that one of African Americans, Junior dislikes his hair and wants to straighten it up to look prettier. This obsession with his hair leads to fights with his mother, as she thinks he might be gay, this fear is worsened as his only friend is a girl and he likes to watch beauty pageants with her.
Junior and his single mother live in a shabby apartment that is in a very dangerous zone of Caracas, we even watch as the children fear getting raped through the conversations they have.
I think this movie is subtle and it reminds me of Moonlight (more like Moonlight reminds me of this movie since Bad Hair came out first). It focuses a lot on the visual aspect, it portrays our macho society that is very uncomfortable with anything that is different. This movie is framed in the time where president Hugo Chávez was dying, which paints an even more uncertain future as we didn't know what would happen to our country, we wondered if we would finally be free (sadly, we still aren't).
All of the actors are great, this movie also looks amazing. It actually won many awards, but most importantly, it won the Concha de Oro in 2013 and is one of the best indie films if not the best one that has come out of our country, this award almost never goes to countries from Latin America, so it was a surprise!
This movie is about our society that is so against accepting what is different, the focus on the hair also points out our racism against black people. This film also talks about how kids that live in poverty only have the option of becoming criminals or military men, Junior wants to dance and sing and his grandmother encourages him because she is afraid he'll become a criminal when he grows old. While the girls, on the other hand, have to focus on beauty. These children barely have any freedom to decide for themselves.
Bad Hair really resonated with me, it's a film about acceptance and it puts a mirror in front of us, it makes us see the reality in which we live in and makes a point of trying to change for the better.
Sources of the Pictures:
First one
Second one
Third one
Fourth one
Fifth one
Sixth one
I tag: @anaout97 and @mjcarvajalp
