Coming to DVD and VOD today, Tuesday, May 6: DESERT RIDERS
Vic Sarin’s investigation into child exploitation in Middle Eastern camel racing debuted at Vancouver in 2011. It went on to screen at IDFA, One World, and Thessaloniki Doc, among other fests.
Camel racing grew from a haphazardly organized local pastime to a point of international pride among the Middle East’s elite. With the sport’s development came the need for jockeys – the lighter, the better – leading to the industrywide practice of utilizing child riders, and, inevitably, a black market in child trafficking to meet the demand. Boys from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sudan were routinely sold into indentured servitude by family or acquaintances, sometimes knowingly, but often not, and subjected to harsh working conditions, forced hormone injections to keep them from growing, and, often, physical and sexual abuse. Documentary evidence of their plight helped to mobilize American intervention, ultimately leading the UAE in 2005 to ban jockeys under the age of fifteen from competing. Sarin’s film, unconnected to the early doc, revisits the story, while also checking in on the repatriation of the exploited children and the struggles many have had to deal with from their traumatic experiences, and, poignantly, from re-entering families and communities that may not be as welcoming as one might expect. This rough-hewn talking heads survey is workmanlike at best, spending far too much time on background for a controversy that largely took place a decade ago, and not enough time on the present-day circumstances of its subjects, who fail to be particularly individuated here.
what (not) to doc 