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The Situation

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THE BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL

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About the film

What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women's lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.

Themes include:  peace/war, women’s rights, cross-cultural studies, beauty

YANG BAN XI

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About the film

History changes all the time. What is good today can be considered bad tomorrow. During the ten years of Cultural Revolution, traditional opera was banned by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and replaced by a new kind of art in which the world was presented in a much simpler way: all the good guys were farmers and revolutionary soldiers, always singing and dancing in the broad spotlight. All the bad guys were landlords and anti revolutionaries, who wore dark make-up and were poorly lit. Pure propaganda told in beautiful images and stories, in an innovative way incorporating the most modern techniques of cinematography, song, and dance, thus becoming a new art form in Chinese culture: Revolutionary model opera – the Yang Ban Xi.

Themes include:  cross-cultural studies, art as propaganda, censorship