Raised by Krump is a great short film about one of the world’s most interesting and energetic dance movements – and how it affected its dancers. Via Short of the Week:
In an era where full-frame DSLR’s are a dime a dozen and every kid with a half-baked script seems to be renting out an Alexa, it’s easier than ever to find a pretty image online. As curators, this is challenging—not too long ago whether you knew how to shoot a film was actually a fairly accurate measure for if your film itself was any good. Not so anymore, and the ease and cost of producing lovely footage has kind of cheapened its impact—if everything looks great, then nothing is special anymore.
As I too often do, this introduction is a meandering attempt to define a film by contrast—acknowledging my preconceived notions only to explain why they have been blown away. True to form, I raise the issue of the ubiquity of beautiful imagery in video and film to draw special attention to Raised by Krump and how it absolutely stands out from the crowd as utterly delightful to look at through its image quality, color grade and the ecstatic motion it captures.
Krump is an energetic and evocative dance form originating out of L.A. in the early 90’s, and this film serves as a loose documentary surveying its history through the lives and experience of individual dancers. It provides an intimate peek into the subculture and into the hearts of some of the style’s practitioners, whom speak of it almost as a form of religious practice—so deep is the spiritual release they experience.