Breaking In

Hip-hop and rap began life in the early 70s in predominantly working-class black communities in the Bronx, New York. DJ Kool Herc is credited with the genre’s creation through using turntable techniques to extend percussive breaks. The musical techniques and sound associated with the genre would continue to evolve and change with time. His collaborator, Coke La Rock, rapped over the breaks. Many party attendees also performed what is now called breakdancing. From there, the music became a popular live feature at parties. In 1979, the first recorded and widely circulated hip-hop tracks emerged, with songs like Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight.

Despite starting as party music and vehicles for an artist’s skills, Hip-hop also spoke about social and political issues. Namely, racism, class, police brutality, and it humanised people painted as criminals.

Cinema began intersecting with hip-hop and rap in the early ’80s with films like Wild Style and Style Wars. This focused on another artistic expression associated with the movement, graffiti. Through documentary (Style Wars) and the combination of live performances and scripted narrative (Wild Style), these films acted as documents of the environment that produced hip-hop. As well as the genre’s early music and style. 

Taking Over

As the 80s went on, hip-hop spread across the world. In the US, artists like LL Cool J and groups like Run-DMC topped the charts. Additionally, MTV eventually began programming shows devoted to the genre. Hip-hop was popular, and film producers took notice.

The film Breakin made over $38 million on a $1.2 million budget. Beat Street and Krush Groove enabled directors Stan Lathan and Michael Schultz to showcase their perspective on the genre to a wider audience, and Run-DMC had their own star vehicle in 1988’s Tougher Than Leather. At the same time, hip-hop songs were being used to market blockbusters. See The Fat Boys’ Are You Ready For Freddy marketing A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.

Then, in 1989, Do the Right Thing came out. Spike Lee’s film is steeped in hip-hop style, music and politics. It discusses topics like racism in working-class communities and police brutality. Features noticeable use of graffiti and makes heavy use (diegetic and thematic) of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. It succeeded commercially and critically. Proving that hip-hop and film could be powerful partners.

Culture And Industry

Since the 90s, hip-hop, rap and cinema have become inseparable. Genre stars, including Tupac Shakur (Juice), Ice Cube (Boyz N the Hood), Queen Latifah (Set It Off) and Will Smith (Men in Black) and more, headlined acclaimed movies. The genre was part of the DNA of New Black Realism and informed modern world cinema. See films like La Haine (France), Kneecap (Ireland), Mogul Mowgli (UK) and the films of Ryan Coogler and many others. Hits like Straight Outta Compton dramatised hip-hop group N.W.A’s story. Meanwhile, the Spider-Verse films feature hip-hop heavily as part of Miles’ world. Artists like Eminem, Three 6 Mafia and Frayser Boy and Common have won Oscars. Kendrick Lamar’s work on the Black Panther soundtrack was also nominated and marked as the start of a new renaissance for movie soundtracks. Hip-hop and rap music are also commonplace within film marketing. 

This is just scratching the surface of the immense impact of hip-hop and rap on cinema. Yet despite all this, the genre’s main architects and audience, black Americans, are still underserved by Hollywood. Roles for black artists, in front of and behind the camera, are still disproportionately low in the US. The executives making the bulk of the money from the artists’ work are still overwhelmingly white, and little is being done by mainstream cinema to achieve hip-hop’s more radical goals. Hollywood will use rap and hip-hop to sell tickets, but will also happily discard artists when convenient. Still, for all the corporate attempts at co-option, there are still earnest uses of the music to give voice and enjoyment to the unseen and downtrodden. That is when cinema truly embodies hip-hop’s spirit.

The post Hip-Hop Hollywood: 50 Years of Rap’s Influence on Film appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Film is a growing factor in shaping the public perception of refugees. Documentaries and biographical films have become a powerful way to raise awareness and foster empathy for displaced individuals. Let’s analyse two films that have shaped this reality.

Three Songs for Benazir (2021)

Three Songs for Benazir is a short documentary film made by Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei. It won 13 awards and was nominated for the 94th Academy Awards. It follows the story of Shaista and Benazir, a newly married young couple living in a camp for internally displaced people in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Rather than an abstract depiction of war, the film takes us into refugees’ everyday lives. We see Shaista pursue his dream to join the national army and struggle to find direction in a place with so few options. The camp is filled with hundreds of displaced people living in mud houses. And yet, there is love. Children laugh and play outside, young men gather to dance, and Shaista sings to Benazir. In the midst of all their struggles, he serenades her with love songs as she shyly giggles behind her headscarf.

This documentary is, first and foremost, a love story. It shows us the humanity of displaced people beyond the statistics and impersonal clips we see on TV. Unlike most observational documentarians, Elizabeth and Gulistan do not take the fly-on-the-wall approach. Although they did not appear in the film themselves, they were close friends with Shaista and Benazir for three years before they ever started filming.

In a 2022 interview with Ms. Magazine, Elizabeth Mirzae stated; “Our films come out of friendship. But I think that you do have to, as a filmmaker, always self-interrogate and have these ethical audits.” This is a refreshing departure from the dozens of exploitative documentaries that frame refugees as one-dimensional caricatures of suffering.

Even though the film centres on the interpersonal experiences of refugees, it still subtly keeps you aware of the very real danger of war. In several scenes, you can see a US surveillance balloon ominously suspended in the sky above the camp. The filmmakers are aware of the risks of this pursuit, but they believe it is one worth taking. Despite the difficulty of filming in these circumstances, the Mirzaes succeeded in telling a beautifully nuanced and humane story.

The Swimmers (2022)

The Swimmers is a biographical film directed by Sally El Hosaini who co-wrote it with Jack Thorne. It is based on the real-life experiences of Syrian sisters Sarah and Yusra Mardini. The teenage sisters were competitive swimmers before they escaped the Syrian civil war in 2015, and fled to Greece on a battered overcrowded dinghy. In the middle of the Aegean Sea, the motor stopped. The sisters got off, strapped themselves to the leaking dinghy and swam until they reached the Greek shore. They made the rest of their journey to Germany over land while facing discrimination, sexual assault and endless bureaucracy. Yusra fights to continue her swimming career in Germany and competes in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Most of the film is factually accurate due to the close collaboration with the sisters. Heavy research was made before storyboarding the scenes and careful casting was done to ensure authenticity. Real-life Lebanese sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa played the Mardine sisters. Several of the supporting cast were refugees, some of whom had made the Aegean crossing themselves.

It was a powerful choice to not centre the film on only Yusra who made headlines at the Rio Olympics. We learn about Sarah, who chose not to compete, and their male cousin Nizar who was their chaperone on their journey. Not everyone can be an Olympian, but every individual refugee has a unique story worth hearing. The scenes of urban Syrian teens dancing in clubs and hanging out with their friends before the war broke the monolithic stereotype of the Arab refugee.

By striving for accuracy and painting a full picture instead of zeroing in on a media heroine, these filmmakers showed us a side of the Syrian war that is often missed.

Ultimately,

Filmmaking is an art as much as it is a political and social expression. With enough patience, resources, and skill, filmmakers can craft brilliant stories that amplify the voices of displaced people.

Also Read: Sustainability Is Never a Boring Topic, See How Chinese Young Filmmaker Hong Ning Perceives ‘Global Sustainability’ Through Images

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The post Behind the Headlines: Films That Capture the Heart and Reality of Refugee Experiences appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

The mat is improvised in a rooftop high up in the favela, afro-Brazilian kids and teenagers are following the assistant instructions and everything is supervised by their purple belt master, the afternoon sun shines the pristine calmness of white wearing gi pupils, but the moment is interrupted when one of them jokes that jiu-jitsu is useless in a street fight. The mentor interrupts with a smile on his face, calls the heckler and subtly demonstrates how to get out when one is grabbed from behind, therefore proving the essence of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, an art made for self-defense and not to impose violence on others.

The scene is from the HBO Max biography The Black Belt (O Faixa-Preta, 2022) released in the streaming service on March 17, telling the life story of Fernando “Tererê” Silva, a man who became a five-time world champion of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) and also brought real improvements for the Cantagalo favela proving the benefits of the martial art that was once relegated to members of the elite society. Tererê’s struggle with schizophrenia and drug addiction also play an important part in the narrative and is portrayed skillfully by actor Raphael Logam.

Brazil has a difficult track record of mediatic portrayals of life in impoverished communities, in particular the favelas, and of black lives as layered individuals. The outside world knows about the quintessential City of God (2002), but when watching soap-operas the same institutions and artists who claim to be allies are still steps behind when it comes to diversity, especially considering Brazilian demographics. One of the positive points of Black Belt is taking that into account without being lecturing or preachy.

The movie directed by Caco Souza follows Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and its first half plays like a sports biography while considering the background of its character as life in a favela comes with the joys, identity but also the violence brought by the drug game and turf battles with other gangs or law enforcement. Death is near them on many occasions, and PTSD and other illnesses, meanwhile Tererê, his family, friends and neighbors still have to find ways to navigate their ordeals and happy moments as the protagonist rises through the BJJ ranks.

The many deaths and the resurrection of Tererê

Through a jiu-jitsu buddy Tererê is introduced to recreational cannabis and later after hitting a skunk, a more powerful variant, it affects him in a way that he loses everything in a professional trip to the USA that would make his name but ends with his detention by the FBI after an outburst in a plane from Miami to São Paulo.

This part is the one in which Logam shows his range. In Brazil, he has portrayed a methodical drug kingpin and has also shown his comedic skills, and here the actor presents a vulnerability that is exposed by the mental illness, drug addiction but also by police brutality and the absence of statal power, be it American or Brazilian.

It is a story of overcoming the odds as it follows Campbell’s stages, and the hero resurrects but only after falling further from cannabis addiction to crack cocaine. The picture shows people that can deal with their drug habits but also how those who can’t and the impacts on those around from family and community. It shows the drug issue without being judgmental.

As stated above Brazilian mainstream media shies away from what is pejoratively called “favela movies,” but those citizens are an integral part of the nation’s society that scarcely have their complex narratives told and when it is done, it exploits the violent aspects. In ‘Black Belt,’ people will see an Afro-Brazilian man who overcomes the odds many times not only for himself but also for those around him.

‘Black Belt’ also has a pleasing photography conducted by Abraão Oliveira and David Reis which makes the viewer feel that the characters are indeed in Rio de Janeiro and not in a generic studio city as can be seen when Tererê is abroad, which makes the city a character in the story as its peculiarities are important to understand the personality of Fernando Tererê. It can be said that the movie is also an important part of telling the recent story of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art that is vital to the MMA game.

The Black Belt is available now in HBO Max

Also Read: Interview: City of God’s Alexandre Rodrigues Discusses The Film’s Impact 20 Years Later

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post Review: The Black Belt (O Faixa-Preta) appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.