India a Dark Place for Women

KalaLife © Documentary Feature

“INDIA A DARK PLACE FOR WOMEN”

By Nkechi Ndukwe

Horrified by the brutal gang-rape of a medical student who was riding the bus home in Delhi, India. Twenty-eight-year old Radha Bedi traveled to India in hopes of finding the reason behind harsh female brutality in India. In the 2013 BBC documentary Radha Bedi visits the victim of the brutal gang-rape as she investigates the reason for gender segregation in India.

The creativity behind this documentary is that a British born woman of Indian decent is exploring the cultural differences between how she was raised in a country with female independence and the suppression of women in India.     

Followed by a small film crew, Bedi roams the streets of Delhi to find an answer to the brutality of women in India. She visits hospitals and speaks with different victims of abuse.  Below is an example the brutality women in India endure, 

BANGALORE: A 38-year-old woman was brutally attacked with a machete in an ATM in the heart of the city on Tuesday, leaving her severely injured, police said.

The woman, manager at Corporation Bank, entered the ATM in which no security guard was present, to withdraw cash when the assailant followed her inside and brought down the shutter before threatening her with the weapon, police said. This documentary utilizes the Indian culture, music, and art to depict the rise and fall of women in India’s culture. This documentary is perfectly executed by having a combination educated historians and doctors that full explain the problems that this brutality  creates.

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KalaLife © Documentary Feature

“A Hip-Hop-menatary; Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest, the Documentary with rhythm”

By Nkechi Ndukwe

From Hip-hop's immense communal acceptance in the early 1980s to the current distorted image surrounding the industry today, this genre of music has quickly submerged the music market with pioneers of rap (hip-hop) who have changed the way people relate to music. Every generation has their handful of musical geniuses who trail-blaze a new way of style and thinking. Hip-hop fans universally experience their own trailblazers as well. No other group solidified their position in the hip-hop kingdom other than the infamous hip-hop group “A Tribe Called Quest.” Through an eloquent documentary, director Micheal Rapaport conveys a different form documentaries by fusing hip-hop and storytelling.

Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest, is not a typical documentary. The editing technique along with the directors vision showcases the impact that hip-hop made on multiple societies during the 90s. Fourteen years after the group's dismantlement in 1997, July 8^th, 2011, became the day that director Michael Rapaport and group members of A Tribe Called Quest: Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jabori White graced fans with their critically acclaimed documentary Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest, an urban twist on biographical documentaries.

After watching Beats Rhymes & Life, the background history of who the four members of A Tribe Called Quest are allows for a better understanding of why the group became breakout pioneers during the era.  Being a Caucasian male director, Micheal Rapaport proves that A Tribe Called Quest has targeted audiences of multiple diversities. In 2013, VH1 aired Beats Rhymes & Life for fans of the group who could not experience the original debut of this urban classic documentary.  With its high viewer ratings, once again, documentaries such as this one show that music fans still appreciate documentaries as an elite form of art that goes beyond the shallow levels of standard films and television.
As a different approach to documentaries this film would favor a feature writer that is interested in music, it is important that the feature story blends the music groups history along with the techniques the director used to creatively tell the story of this shift in hip-hop music.