Hue: A Matter of Colour (2013)
Director: Vic Sarin
Country: Canada
Genre: Documentary
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for the 2014 ReelWorld Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit www.reelworld.ca and follow ReelWorld on Twitter at @ReelWorldFilm.
The world has struggled with racism virtually as long as man has had the capacity to despise and distrust any differences he can see. Mankind has a long, terrible history of murder, subjugation, rape, torture and complete oppression based on little more than the skin color of those involved. Less well-recognized, though no less pernicious, is colorism, the discrimination within a race based on skin tone.
Though Sarin’s exploration is incredibly wide geographically, Hue eschews any serious depth. “How can people be devalued, even dehumanized, based on their skin color?” Sarin asks at the film’s midpoint, and the question arises how it has taken him so long to arrive at a question so basic.
Early in Hue: A Matter of Colour, director Vic Sarin takes his family on a trip to Brazil. His children cannot wait to spend time with their oft-absent father, and are very excited for the trip. When they arrive, they all want to head straight for the beach, but Sarin will not go with them. He explains, in voiceover, that as a child, his mother warned him to stay out of the sun, forcing him to wear pants and long-sleeved shirts at all times, for fear that his skin would darken if he were exposed. This anecdote begins Sarin’s globe-spanning investigation into colorism.
His journey takes him to places like South Africa, Tanzania, and back to his native India, where he hears stories of colorism and its disastrous effects. Sarin interviews a woman who has had her skin lightened (and runs a business that provides this service to others), a white woman in South Africa who married a black man, and whose children have experienced life-long discrimination as a result, and Indian woman who cannot find an arranged marriage because her skin is too dark, and others. He hears of the horrible mistreatment of albinos (whose limbs have historically been cut off for use in spells by witch doctors), and examines these people’s hopes for the future and fears in the present.
Hue works to draw attention to the issue of colorism, and to make the point that our struggle with skin color is far from over.
Though Sarin’s exploration is incredibly wide geographically, Hue eschews any serious depth. “How can people be devalued, even dehumanized, based on their skin color?” Sarin asks at the film’s midpoint, and the question arises how it has taken him so long to arrive at a question so basic. It is a question that haunts not just the film, but humanity as a whole. Yet it is a question we have all heard asked before, and one the film seems incapable, or at least uninterested, in answering. All of the various conversations Sarin has come around to similar points: Colorism is bad. Discrimination hurts those against which it is directed. Hate has consequences; pain lasts generations
Hue works to draw attention to the issue of colorism, and to make the point that our struggle with skin color is far from over. Sarin brings attention to an issue that is often ignored in favor of interracial conflicts, and shows the many ways that colorism can ruin and deform lives just as racism does. The film never finds its way to a point that has any depth or resonance beyond the idea that colorism is a negative thing, but it does depict the myriad ways it affects people throughout the globe. Hue doesn’t have any answers, and its questions aren’t particularly original, but they are ones that demand to be asked, again and again, until we can come up with answers that stop the cycle of hate, pain, and shame from perpetuating itself any further.
[notification type=”star”]64/100 ~ OKAY. Hue doesn’t have any answers, and its questions aren’t particularly original, but they are ones that demand to be asked, again and again, until we can come up with answers that stop the cycle of hate, pain, and shame from perpetuating itself any further.[/notification]
