Dragon Girls

In Henan province in China, right beside the Shaolin Monastery, stands the country’s largest kung fu school; tens of thousands of children board there, live far from their families and spend most of the day training. Inigo Westmeier’s documentary picks three girls out of that crowd and follows them. The film does not avoid showing how hard the discipline is, but it also refuses to present the children as products of a system, building them instead as people with dreams of their own and moments of escape. Why the families send their children there is part of the account too. It asks questions about selection, conformity and being made uniform, and puts those questions not only to China but to any order like it. A ninety-minute German production, it came out in 2012.