On Feb. 27, the Spanish Film Club Series screened a showing of internationally-renowned

Pelo Malo

. Set in Venezuela, the film follows Junior, a young Afro-Venezuelan boy who wishes to straighten his curly hair to look like his idea of a successful singer. The film successfully situates the intimate, personal conflicts caused by a boy’s obsessions with his hair within the broader context of Venezuela’s political climate around 2013. Overall, the film is about love (and lack of it,) family, and survival.

In

Pelo Malo

— or “bad hair” — nine-year-old Junior is caught between societal standards that devalue who he is. His obsession with wanting to straighten his hair reveals an underlying self-hatred based on racialized beauty standards while his budding desires in singing, dancing, and an older boy are perceived by others — especially his mother — as wrong. At the start of the film, it appears that Junior attempts to embrace his unconventional desires while trying to straighten his curls. But by the end of this film, his own decision to shave off his hair as well as his refusal to sing the school anthem with other school children demonstrates a complete rejection of his own identity. By not resolving the conflict of Junior’s hair or budding sexuality in positive way, the film establishes how difficult it would be to reverse these standards in Venezuela.

The film brings to focus the physical and emotional pain behind Junior’s curly hair. He forces a hair brush down his locks, causing him to drop pieces of hair on his sink. He rubs all kinds of things on his hair, from a mayonnaise and avocado concoction to vegetable oil, in order to slick his curls down. At this grandmother’s house, he is able to straighten his hair but must quickly wash it before his mother picks him back up.

Moreover, the film delivers excruciatingly heart-wrenching and difficult scenes to watch. As a film focused on childhood, the viewer sees how the young protagonists begin to form their own worldview and sense of self. Junior learns to hate his hair and his budding sexuality. His friend, an unnamed young girl, learns to dislike her body in a society that favors thinness. The film adeptly illustrates how different sources in everyday life inform the young characters’conception of their own selves. For example, a beauty pageant on TV results in the crowning of a thin, light-skinned, straight-haired model. The young girl plays with a skinny, blonde, white Barbie doll while listening to a group of women chanting about starving themselves. In a painful scene, Junior’s mother forces her son to watch her have sex with a man in order to provide him with an “example” of a proper relationship. And finally, one of the film’s final scenes shows Junior’s mother forcing him to pick between no longer living with her or shaving his head altogether. The emotional pain of all these scenes is unrelenting and drive the painful lesson home that children at a young age learn how to value or devalue themselves.

After the film screening, there was a Q&A session with the film’s director Mariana Rondon. For Rondon, the most important achievement of the film was being able to represent how larger political and societal problems are involved in the most intimate aspects of people’s lives across all ages. The characters must respond to the problems of living in a working-class, urban environment. The film focuses on the inherent conflicts and fundamental values attached to hair.

On one level, hair can serve as a political tool. For example, a short news clip in the film shows proud patriots shaving off their hair in solidarity with a socialist Venezuela. On an individualized level, Junior’s curly hair reflects an inherent tension between racist beauty standards that devalue Afro-Venezuelans and heteronormative standards that punish boys for caring about their appearances and behaving in ways deemed emasculating.

Rondon discussed how the film has sparked different conversations across the world. In the United States, Rondon discusses how reactions to the film focused on themes around race. In France and other European countries, the movie has sparked more conversation around sexuality and gender. In Venezuela, the film has been controversial, and Rondon said she has received death threats and accusations of betraying her homeland. The varied reactions demonstrate how a film with cultural particularities can cut across difference and speak to world.