Customer Reviews

Disappearing World: Masai Women [VHS]

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After traveling in Kenya and meeting Masai women, I was amazed by their strength and artistic abilities. The lives of Masai women are often over shadowed by the exotic lives of their male counterparts. This documentary cleary illustrates the power and strength of these women. Their lives are complex and beautiful. As women of the world, they exemplify the honor of womanhood.

As a student of visual culture studies in Norway my point is following. It is of course a beautiful film about the strongness of these Masai women, but there are many things which could have done differently. The fact that the film is made for TV is very obvious from the very first second, as everything is clearly explained and clarified. The spectator gets this feeling of being educated and told what they see and how to see. It is beautiful to experience the closeness what the filmmaker has managed to get with these women, probably caused by her long stay with them and also that she spoke their language and not least that she is a woman herself. There are many things which make us in the 'West' stop and think as for example the fact that the Masai co-wives are not jealous and they have their own reasons for that as there is 'a lot of work to do', so these women are taken as family members not as competitors. The issues of past and present are touched very briefly, but the change is inevitable. It is in many ways a very classical anthropological film, which gives you a feeling that 'western women' have no rights to complain, as there are women out there in this big world, who have more difficult environment for their survival than we do.