As such, Bikram charts the rise and fall of a deeply problematic man and offers a slightly more left-field take on the reckoning of the MeToo phenomenon. That take-no-prisoners attitude included verbally abusing overweight students and demeaning his pupils physically during classes, while his charismatic relationship with Bikramites meant the rape and assault allegations didn’t arise against him until 2017. But, over a 50-year career, Bikram has also been accused of intense cruelty and sexual abuse towards his employees and practitioners. From the 1970s onwards, he was a sort of superstar in the yoga community, with a take-no-prisoners attitude towards teaching and a deep, almost cultish bond with his followers, who variously include Madonna, Lady Gaga and David Beckham. And it shows: Bikram is in his mid-seventies, but has the flexibility of a balding, wrinkly child.
#MINUTE OF ISLANDS NARRATOR SERIES#
įor those less yogically inclined, Bikram Choudhury is the inventor of a technique called “hot yoga”, which involves executing a series of 26 poses in extremely hot temperatures. What’s more, the silent archival footage of Tan in her film in an oversaturated 1992 Singapore is deeply, weirdly hypnotic and testament to the quality of the film, which never saw the light of day (until now) for reasons explained in the documentary.
Finally, she reveals what exactly happened to Cardona almost 30 years ago. The story seems simple, until layers are peeled back and Tan gradually drip-feeds subtext into the film, carefully presenting her friends and collaborators, aged 19, in ways that explain where they ended up now, in their late forties, and exploring her friends’ quiet feminism until we come to know and respect the characters intimately. On the surface, it sees Singaporean director Sandi Tan revisit a film, also called Shirkers, which she and her friends made as young students in the early 1990s, with the help of a mysterious older man named Georges Cardona, who later disappeared with all their footage.
Shirkers is possibly the best film I saw in 2018. Welcome To Leith charts the increasingly fraught confrontations between Cobb and his cronies – who rarely left their houses without packing multiple firearms – and the locals, who turned out to be tougher to intimidate than Cobb anticipated. Needless to say, things got tense and by the end of the experiment certain buildings in Leith were reduced to charred ruins. That’s exactly what happened in Leith, North Dakota, in 2012, when a white supremacist named Craig Cobb tried to build an artificial majority in the tiny town, whose population is somewhere between 15 and 20 people. But the second is to simply find enough people who think the same way as you and buy up as much property as you can in a town small enough that you can outvote the other residents, moving there en masse to take over the legislature in the process. How do you set up a neo-Nazi state? According to Welcome To Leith, there are two options: the first is through the traditional method of election through populist gaslighting, attacks on truth and the media and stoking racial divisions.
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