{"id":33877,"date":"2013-10-13T22:31:29","date_gmt":"2013-10-13T22:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=33877"},"modified":"2013-10-13T22:33:34","modified_gmt":"2013-10-13T22:33:34","slug":"pelo-malo-bad-hair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=33877","title":{"rendered":"Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sudaca Films
\n2013
\nVenezuela
\n93 minutes
\ncolor<\/p>\n

Written and Directed by Mariana Rond\u00f3n<\/a><\/strong>
\nProduced by Marit\u00e9 Ug\u00e1s<\/strong><\/p>\n

Starring<\/p>\n

Samuel Lange<\/strong> as Junior
\nSamantha Castillo<\/strong> as Marta<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Junior is nine years old and has \u201cbad hair.\u201d He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him, until he is cornered, face to face with a painful decision.<\/p>\n

Director’s Note<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bad Hair<\/em> is the intimate story of a nine-year old child\u2019s initiation to life and his difficult journey marked by intolerance.<\/p>\n

One of the first images that came to me for this movie was a large multi-family building and the thousands of stories that take place behind those walls: heat, nudity, precariousness, fragility, sensuality, sex, violence, family, mother, child. The little, intimate stories I imagined grew more complex and so my characters were born.<\/p>\n

They are helpless characters. Wounded and hurtful adults, and children who are learning how to hurt. Marta, the mother, focused on survival, teaches her son Junior to survive just like her, without resources, without freedom. But Junior is different, he fights with everything he\u2019s got for his desire: to straighten his hair and to dress as a singer for a picture he wants to give his mother: a picture that would show him as he wishes to be seen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Caracas<\/a> is also hostile to them, a city of urban, political and family violence. Dreams encapsulated in multi-family buildings- the result of Le Corbusier\u2019s<\/a> \u201cUtopian city\u201d project in the 50s\u2014now turned into massive vertical hells.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about intolerance in a social context that is riddled with dogmas, which don\u2019t embrace otherness, where public affairs extend to the private life of its\u2019 inhabitants, highlighting their differences, be they social, political or sexual.<\/p>\n