Hair India Raffaele Brunetti, Marco Leopardi

My hair grows. Your hair grows. It’s a biological automatism; we don’t need to water our scalp. But we’re living in a world in which everything has a price, and therefore - as a good - we can sell and buy hair, too; they will grow back, so there’s no problem. In essence, the body is not on the market (at least not the legal one), but its renewable prolongations, well… why not?

Hair India is a fascinating (although very critical) journey into this weird lizard-tail-like marketing process. We follow the product’s movements and transformations from the very beginning - a devout and poor Hindu family, offering hair in a temple as a present for the divinity - to the final destination - a wealthy and glamorous journalist, buying expensive extensions to enlarge her “crowning glory” for a big party.

As a matter of fact, both the starting and ending point of the trade-chain are located in the Indian peninsula: a clever narrative choice, surely the best way to show the parallel, almost opposite lives of the (unknowing) producers and the (unaware) consumers brushing up against one another – just as suburban slums and skyscrapers usually do in the so-called “third world”, while someone is earning money in the background.

The middle link of the production is actually Europe: here the hair (collected from the temple and exported in huge stocks by local dealers) is polished, refined, divided into colours and shades, ready to be shipped off elsewhere. This transition area is very important, as it appears to be not only at the core of this topic, but of our entire consumer society. Discretionary money is often used to buy materialized desires, so if you’re able to create new needs and obtain cheap raw materials by means of exploitation, you’ll be a rich man. Of course this is just one of the million strange stories that come out of rampant globalization, but it’s so paradoxical that it will be hard to forget, thus becoming a provocation to rethink the whole system.

It’s interesting to note that one of Raffaele Brunetti’s previous documentaries was also focused on an inanimate object: Mitumba (2005) tells the story of a used t-shirt travelling from Germany to Africa, where white-people’s second-hand clothes account for 90% of the market. Maybe he wants to point out how in the “empire of things” the main characters could sometimes hide a precious voice, a voice that is far louder than the price tag.

Alberto Angelini