Dragon Girls
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Dragon Girls

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Director Inigo Westmeier’s documentary Dragon Girls follows the lives of three pupils at the Shaolin Tagu Kung Fu school located next to the famous Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province. As the country’s largest martial arts school with 35,000 pupils, this vast, bleak, industrial aged institution is centred on one thing and one thing only – at this school it is eat, sleep and train kung fu.

All the children board full time as their parents are away working and the relationships, or lack thereof, that they have with their family is just one of the themes running through this beautiful yet brutal film. Days at Shaolin Tagu start at 5am and signal the start of another relentless and ongoing physical workload of stretching, fighting, striking, leaping, jumping, running and the ongoing search to do better than you are doing – even if that is the best you can do.

In one shocking yet captivating scene, five young girls, aged around 9 or 10 sit round and compare injuries they have received from pushing their still-developing bodies to the limits. One girl talks of the ongoing pain in her knees while another lifts her sleeve to reveal a large scar running the length of her upper arm caused by the swords they use in their martial arts displays. We see starkly the cultural gulf that exists between this and the cotton wool western approach to child rearing, and are left in awe of how so much can be expected of those so young.