lucasmaaser Review of 8 Days

8 Days (2014)

Strongly victimizing piece promoting the director's limited and false perceptions of gender and race through religion. Worrisome at best.

[1/10 · 10 March 2016]

I have had the doubtful opportunity to watch Mr. Booyens piece revolving around the issue of Human Trafficking in minors in the US-American context as part of a conference in late 2015. He joined the screening himself, promoting his troubling view on religion, gender and race. The movie itself features an overly emotionalized, one-dimensional and victimizing perspective on survivors of Human Trafficking, characterizing trafficked sex workers as mentally unstable drug addicts under the reign of non-white caretakers that fulfill every racial stereotype one could imagine. On the other side of his victim-perpetrator-dichotomy, there are troubled parents and community members finding their strength in overly promoted prayer and their faith in god, which paints a pretentious picture of religious trouble-solving at best. His vision of society, which I would like to describe euphemistically as "conservative", could be observed best when one of the main characters trying to push the investigation is identified as the wife of a local politician by a police man using a partriarchally biased comment. This scene alone shows his limited imagination when it comes to gender-biased occupations, as it is obviously not possible in the director's society construct for women to occupy political leadership positions. If this is the understanding of gender-related topics of someone who is dealing with a highly gender-biased issue it will not only not contribute to the cause of deconstructing Human Trafficking, but rather damage those efforts by promoting stereotypes that are believed to have died decades ago.