Having caught this film last night on the t.v. I was unsure as to what I was about to see, but sat through it anyway. What I found was a saddening and unsettling freak show of deep south U.S.A. and was left feeling I had just watched what could have have been poverty study of rural Russia dubbed into English with some cracking tunes.
The fanaticism of some of the characters visited in the trailer parks and church halls of the economically sparse parts of Louisiana was not a far cry from cultist child abuse - one frightening scene showing a young boy of about ten surrounded in a church by aged women who were screaming and chanting at his shuddering body as they covered him in their hands channelling religious energy into him, the backdrop behind them a writhing mass of tears, laughter and hysteria. The boy himself brainwashed into a frenzy of religious fervour.
The people featured throughout the documentary were a collection of ex-cons, lunatics, hugely talented musicians (although some dreadful) and misfits cast aside by the vastness of the American capitalist empire and somehow all bonded by their all encompassing belief that they had saved themselves from the flames of eternal damnation - "a lake of fire your soul perpetually burns amongst" as one put it. In all the film doesn't judge harshly these people, cut-offs from the produce of the factory of America, or their ways, but instead shows the methods their culture has adopted and adapted to maintain spirit in a desolate and seemingly fruitless existence.
Watch it, it's beautiful film-making, but watch it the way you watch a lunatic screaming a rocks in a park.
The fanaticism of some of the characters visited in the trailer parks and church halls of the economically sparse parts of Louisiana was not a far cry from cultist child abuse - one frightening scene showing a young boy of about ten surrounded in a church by aged women who were screaming and chanting at his shuddering body as they covered him in their hands channelling religious energy into him, the backdrop behind them a writhing mass of tears, laughter and hysteria. The boy himself brainwashed into a frenzy of religious fervour.
The people featured throughout the documentary were a collection of ex-cons, lunatics, hugely talented musicians (although some dreadful) and misfits cast aside by the vastness of the American capitalist empire and somehow all bonded by their all encompassing belief that they had saved themselves from the flames of eternal damnation - "a lake of fire your soul perpetually burns amongst" as one put it. In all the film doesn't judge harshly these people, cut-offs from the produce of the factory of America, or their ways, but instead shows the methods their culture has adopted and adapted to maintain spirit in a desolate and seemingly fruitless existence.
Watch it, it's beautiful film-making, but watch it the way you watch a lunatic screaming a rocks in a park.