WOEBOT

Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary’s documentary focuses on the life and times of one Anderson Sa. Anderson was a drug-dealer in Rio de Janeiro’s notorious Vigario Geral slum before the murder of his innocent brother at the hands of corrupt police, deployed to avenge the death of a senior official, precipitated his decision to join the revolutionary community project Afro Reggae. With humble origins as “Afro Reggae Noticias”, a fanzine dedicated to the Black Brazilian positivity, Afro Reggae grows in stature. Anderson quickly becomes the figurehead of the movement, which soon seeks to recruit young people before they’re ensnared in the grimly seductive and well-paid career path of the drug dealer, a path invariably leading to early death. Afro Reggae’s strategy at the grassroots level most visibly revolves around Capoeira classes (Brazil’s fighting-dance) and Batacuda workshops (where in the absence of proper instruments, kids pound giant plastic oil drums to dazzling effect) but also extends to hygiene and literacy programmes. Their contribution to the life of their favela seems almost immeasurable, a glorious manifestation of Director Jeff Zimbalist’s desire to depict “communities that succeed, that overcome great adversity, that unite and reach and achieve. In short – communities that work.”

Afro Reggae’s signing to Universal Music as “a group” marked a definitive shift in the project’s fortunes. Although the film is keen to posit Banda Afro Reggae as nothing quite so uncomplicated as the mouthpiece of the movement, it is worth making a subtle distinction between the mediatized entity and its origin. While on the one hand, like the Zulu Nation, Anderson Sa’s collective have succeeded in channelling street energy into positive forms; on the other the music of Afro Reggae fails to strike quite the same enervating and radical shapes as that of Bambaata’s movement. Plying a comfortable, soft-focussed fusion of Funk, Reggae, and Hip-Hop with nods to the Miami-bass-inflected thoroughbred mongrel of Baile Funk, Afro Reggae’s music never quite lights the wick. It may be that Zimbalist, who though he succeeds admirably in wrapping the audience up in the gripping roller coaster ride of Sa’s street-life (culminating in a fearfully poignant climax which it is kind to not ruin for the reader), capturing the cultural milieu in thrilling graphics, doesn’t quite manage to do their music justice. The film, a tremendous bare-knuckled odyssey, hardly suffers. One is left inspired by the humility and generosity of these selfless visionaries.