Wacken – if you're one of the million Metalheads between Madrid, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Cape Town or Anaheim, California, what comes to mind? Yeah, the grandest Rock festival since Woodstock and an army of long-haired, Metal-Maniacs partying like it was doomsday
annually! However, this is not the Wacken we get to see in this documentary – at least not until the last few minutes. Director Sung Hyung-Cho gives us the mundane, every-other-day-of-the-year Wacken. See, Wacken actually exists and is a North-German hamlet with no more than about 2,000 inhabitants. Farmers, farmers and more farmers, relatives and friends, and a small supermarket in the centre of the village. And cows. Lots of cows.
Hyung-Cho interviews a number of those people living in Wacken, asking them about their daily walks of life, chores and rituals; all with the amazement of the 'stranger in a strange land' (Hyung-Cho being Korean), to whom all is new and exciting.
And suddenly "Full Metal Village" Wackens population swells up to 80,000 people. The opening of the annual "Wacken Heavy Metal Festival" and the Tartars have arrived: Hordes of leather-clad, long-haired Metalheads storm the village: menacing Thrash Metal fans, tattooed Death Metalheads, satanic Black Metal fans with upside-down crosses, etc, and there is much looting, pillaging and bloodshed everywhere
well, actually, there's none. A great time is had by all: the fans enjoying five days of pure Heavy Metal, the inhabitants of Wacken enjoying the profit, making more money in three days then they would make in the remaining eleven month, and all celebrate along the sound of sweet, sweet heavy metal.
Don't look for interviews with the festival promoters, with the bands ("it was the greatest experience of our lives", and so on) or a 'Best-of-Heavy-Metal' soundtrack, you won't find any. The three day festival fades like a mirage and live returns to 'normal' in Wacken – until the festival returns next year, when Metal-fans from around the world will scream "Waaaaacken!!!" once again and when the inhabitants of Wacken can, for five more days, bath in gold and silver again.
And that's that magic of "Full Metal Village"
. 8 points out of 10.
