I went to go see the Bakal Boys at SIFF. This movie was about a group of boys who would get money for their family by collecting scraps of metal from boats and from the ocean. One day, they were searching for an anchor and one of the boys did not return home. They spent days looking for him, but could never find him.
During this movie, I could not help but notice the way in which the boys’ class was portrayed throughout the film. They showed that the boys were low class in many ways. One way that stuck out in the very beginning of the movie was that the boys would wear the same clothing every day. One of the boys ripped a rather large hole in his pants, but still wore them the next day. This portrayed that they were too poor to own more than one pair of pants. Another way in which they showed their class was through their house. Their house was ultimately outdoors, with the sand that they walked on outside as the floor. They used drapes, sheets, and woven twine and bamboo as their walls. This was very sad, considering that they did not have appropriate housing, especially since their family was pretty large.
The movie did not show very many issues about gender, except for that all of the children were boys, and I never say one little girl throughout the film. Also, that this movie did not pass the bechdel test. Another issue on gender was that the boy who went missing only had a grandma, whop they never showed going to look for him, but showed other people telling her that they would look for him for her. They only showed her mourning the lost of her grandson.
This movie may have shown a little bit of some race issues since all of the people in the movie were Phillipino, a minority in the U.S., and that they were living in poverty.
Overall, this movie would not be one that I would recommend to go see. I thought that it could use more female characters, more diversity in class (since the lower class was all that they showed in the film), and maybe have some other races involved in different aspects of the movie (To show maybe some more privileged Phillipinos so that there is not a stereotype that all phillipinos are poor).
