Full Metal Village

This amusing, very human film begins by painting an ethnographic portrait of a small community called Wacken, in north-east Germany. We meet the local dairy farmer, who has a dry wit and an interesting idea about 'fun'. We also meet the fat community leader who has a finger in every pie and a cigarette constantly attached to his bottom lip. We meet the older women and churchgoers in the community, who bake cake every Sunday, as well as the teenagers, who dream of getting out of Wacken into the adult world. As the film is introducing us to these people and their lives, in the background we have the knowledge that every year, this tiny typical corner of rural Germany opens its fields to the "Wacken Open Air", a huge, well-organised metal music festival. The film was made over two years, 2005-2006, by a South Korean woman now living in Germany, and this fact, in my opinion adds to the warmth and depth of the film. Outsiders, especially those from other countries, often notice or focus on those things about life in their adopted country which a native may take for granted and ignore. It is these things, rather than, or more than the eventual arrival of the pierced people in black, that make the film the enjoyable and memorable experience that it is. Go see it!

Wacken is not only the name of a small town in the very north of Germany. Every year the largest Heavy Metal festival in Europe is held in that little town counting 1.800 inhabitants. For five days, thousands of freaked out people with long hair and black clothes invade the town to celebrate "W:O:A", "Wacken Open Air".

The film is supposed to be a portrait of the lives of the people from Wacken, what they do for living and how they think about these five days when more than 60.000 (75.000 in 2007) long haired, evil looking "metalheadz" conquer their small untouched world. As I said, it is supposed to be....

The film leaves me with many unused possibilities. Example: There is a girl and her grandmother living in Wacken. Granny tells us about how she was forced to leave Prussia in WW2 and how she came to live in Wacken. In the next scene we see her praying before going to bed, her granddaughter tells us, that she is a very religious woman and she doesn't think very well about the festival and the people. But granny herself is never asked for her opinion by the director.

What do these old people think about rock music and heavy metal? Why does granny find it so bad? What are her worries? What are her fears? What image does she have of all the black clothed people shaking their heads to music that tells stories of murder and blood? The film doesn't ask enough questions.

We get to know many people from the village, but we get to know the surface. The director simply doesn't ask enough questions, she just lets the people talk. Talk about their jobs, their lives as farmers, the stories of their weddings.

But that's nothing special. If I want to hear stories about being forced to walk from Prussia to Germany during WW2, I go visit my grandma. If I want to hear stories about farming, I watch TV-documentaries.

The film is called "Full Metal village", but it makes one mistake: It doesn't confront the village with the metal at all. The special thing about Wacken is the people from that small village being confronted with the biggest metal festival in Europe. Wacken is an average German village with average German people who have average jobs and average hobbies, the film shows the everyday life in an average German village. I don't want to hear stories of their cows and what the difference between a cow and a calf is. I want to know: What do these average farmers think about the festival?

The film didn't give any interesting answers. Because it didn't ask any questions at all.

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.

"The film is supposed to be a portrait of the lives of the people from Wacken, what they do for living and how they think about these five days when more than 60.000 (75.000 in 2007) long haired, evil looking "metalheadz" conquer their small untouched world. As I said, it is supposed to be...." (from the previous post) In my opinion this is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of movies in general and this precious piece of documentary especially. Did the director hold a press conference before the filming began, where she stated something along the lines of "my movie will be a portrait of the lives of the people from Wacken, what they do for a living and how they think..."? We must not confuse our own expectations with somebody else's supposed intentions. The very essence of every piece of art is its non-explicitness! This movie is so full of rich observations beyond the ordinary TV crap that probably would never have been possible had the director taken a more "investigative" approach, e.g. stalking people with "how do you feel about this and that" kind of questions. What the previous poster does not seem to be aware of: Sometimes not asking too eagerly might be the only way to get an honest answer.