Virgil Films &
Entertainment has added two DVD product offerings to its November release slate
… a big-budget film epic and an intense documentary about child exploitation.
Nov. 26 will be the
street date for director Akan Satayev’s epic tale of the birth of Kazakhstan, Myn
Bala: Warriors of the Steppe.
This film was Kazakhstan’s official entry for last year’s Academy Awards
and is something of a Kazakh phenomenon — what is on the screen, if produced by
a Hollywood-based production company, would have cost ten times what the actual
budget (a national labor of love) turned out to be.
The story centers around
the unlikely 1729 defeat of the far superior forces of the invading Dzungars (Zunghar
Khanate) by a rag-tag force of young Kazakhs lead by a teenager named Sartay
(Asylkhan Tolepov). As with William
Wallace of Braveheart fame, Sartay’s name represents Kazakh independence
to this day (despite over 100 years of Russian and Soviet occupation).
On Nov. 12 Virgil Films
& Entertainment will release documentary filmmaker Todd Kellstein’s Buffalo
Girls, a harrowing look at the underground world of Thai boxing … not
that of adults, but of young girls who are recruited to the world of Muay Thai
prizefights to earn money for their families.
Kellstein’s film focuses
on the lives of two eight year-old girls — out of some 30,000 children who
fight in the rings of rural Thailand, often without head gear and formal
training. In the case of sisters Stam
and Pet, they have professional training, rigorous workouts and fight for both
the money and the pride of it; of being a “professional.”
The film doesn’t judge —
in a Western sense — but shows the harsh realities of being born to poverty in
the remote regions of Thailand. Endless
toil in the farming communities, the prospects of being sold off to the sex
trade or fight, these are often the only options young girls in these villages have
… the film is shocking, intense and yet both insightful and fascinating.
To download this week's
complete edition of the DVD and Blu-ray Release Report: DVD & Blu-ray Release Report
No comments:
Post a Comment