Hot Docs

Gaea Girls, Longinotto’s last film shot in Japan, takes us deep inside the gruelling and often humiliating training regime of female Japanese professional wrestlers. The lives of the trainees are Spartan; they train in a corrugated warehouse and sleep in a tiny shack. And the training is intense, with workouts that could easily rival Rocky’s “Eye of the Tiger” montage. The film focuses largely on young trainee Takeuchi as she prepares to become an official Gaea wrestler. Takeuchi is subjected to beatings and ritual humiliation by the team’s top wrestler and charismatic mentor, Nagayo. Gaea Girls is an intensely emotional and complicated experience, a testament to Longinotto’s formidable filmmaking skills. In the end, you can’t help but wonder which path would be better for Takeuchi—to succeed and enter the brutal, unforgiving world of wrestling, or to fail and be spared? - Shannon Abel