Girl Rising

I'm a guy and I pretty much never cry, but some of these stories made me cry. Not that that makes it a great film, but rather it is the content.

This film tells such wonderful stories in so many different ways. Great stories, great narration great visuals and soundtrack.

The stories show the horrendous things that women have to endure in developing countries and makes me really mad about how much energy we waste on frivolous issues in the developed world.

It really hammers home the point that investment into the education of young women in developing countries is one of the single best social investment we can make into a country.

Girl Rising (2013) is a documentary directed by Richard Robbins. The movie is linked to an organization, also called Girl Rising, which works to improve the lives of young women around the world who are victims of forced marriages. Often these women are sold by their parents to much older men. Many of these "marriages" are really a form of sexual slavery.

Many of the young women and their families appear in their own stories. Voice-over narration is provided by major stars: Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Selma Hayek, Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, and Kerry Washington.

The plight of these young women is terrible, and any steps that can improve social conditions for them are worth supporting. However, as a movie, I thought that Girl Rising didn't completely work. It wasn't a stand-alone film. It made sense only with the understanding that it was aimed at pulling people into a support role for the sponsoring organization.

On the other hand, to my surprise, the sponsoring organization didn't make a very strong push for support from the audience. So, I left the theater with the thought that life is really, really hard for women in many countries. That's a point worth making, but then what?

We saw the movie in a theater, but it will work well on DVD.

I'm really sorry for all the girls involved whose stories are undoubtedly important and beautiful while tragic. Unfortunately I won't learn about most of them because this movie is a piece of manipulative propaganda. Especially if the messages pushed are so widely accepted by the audience this is targeted to, I don't see why indulging in such unbearable tear-jerking music, tasteless poetic words and heavily symbolic, marketing inspired techniques.

Someone recently coined the usage of the slightly uncorrect - but rather effective - term "pornographic", to refer to mechanically induced feelings: which is exactly what this film does unashamedly. It tells you what to feel, when to feel it, what to think and what you have to do. Let's not even delve into the fact that education of women alone can't solve anything in the world by itself without being willing to tear down other bricks in the wall (a thing which I'm sure Intel Corp. Would be much more cautious about).

A failure as a documentary and possibly a failure even as an attempt to promote a cause because I doubt that people would like to watch this long lesson on how s****y the world is without some artistic trade-off. Indeed I tried to watch it 3 or 4 times in a period of at least 3 years and every time it made the same impression. So I give up.

Only valuable in a history class when we'll all be dead to see what the best progressive marketing was like in 2013.

The thesis of this documentary is that the solution for the more than six million women in third world countries and otherwise impoverished regions who are oppressed, abused and violated is education. This documentary follows the story of seven women from Sierra Leone, India, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nepal and Egypt. It shows how each of these women bettered themselves and their lives through education, albeit gaining such an education was an extreme struggle.

I have nothing against the message of the documentary. It has started a "girl rising" movement for global education of women, and that's fantastic. I just didn't find the documentary itself very entertaining. They tried to use a variety of cinematographic techniques, but it simply failed to entertain me. It is worth watching for the eye-opening statistics, but you may feel like your history teacher didn't feel like teaching today and popped in a video.

A documentary that tells the stories of nine girls from different third world countries who by education seek to break the clutches of arranged marriages, slavery, forced labor and the like. The message of the film is strong, but the film itself does not have the quality and strength that such a theme deserves and which such a message needs to bear fruit.

7/10