Documentary captures drama, intensity of female wrestling - Feature

Documentary captures drama, intensity of female wrestling - Feature:

"In 'Gaea Girls' (2000), a Japanese wrestling film, the heroes of the ring are not men, but women, and while they sport some pretty fabulous leotards, their moves are a world away from the posturing and theatrics we see in the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

'Gaea Girls' follows the sport of women's wrestling in Japan, an intense affair that is both terrifying and fascinating to watch. In the ring, there is the obligatory smoke and flashing lights, the pounding pump-up music and stage names, but it is outside of the ring, at the training base, that most of the drama and excitement actually occurs.

The Gaea Japan training complex sits along a dusty road surrounded by empty farm fields, and is home to a dozen or so girls who cry, sweat and bleed in hopes of graduating to the professional circuit of wrestling.

Unlike most documentaries, the film lacks more than a few individual interviews with its cast, and it provides little context or background for those not familiar with the history of Japanese women's wrestling, or wrestling period. The viewer is thrown into this world of banshee-esque shrieking and flailing limbs, flying drop-kicks and hair-pulling. "