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Plot Summary
Chronicles the lives of a new generation of young boxers fighting for their place in the American boxing mecca of Los Angeles, where Latino immigration is surging to a historical breaking point. At the heart of the film is the complex relationship between a trio of teenage boxers and their seasoned trainers who have their own ambitions to create world championship fighters. Parents cross the border with hopes for the future, and their children chase dreams, as well as a deep sense of self, inside and outside the ring. Over four years, twin brothers Oscar and Javier Molina, come of age and must fight as if their lives depend on making it to the Olympics and into the professional ranks of the sport. (Includes some Spanish with English Subtitles)
Credits
Director
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
33%- Reviews Counted: 6
- Fresh: 2
- Rotten: 4
- Average Rating: 4.7/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Rotten: As he tells the story of a pair of teenage brothers looking to qualify for the Olympic boxing team and an even younger fighter trying to overcome a troubled childhood, Frimmer in essence loses the forest for the trees.
Rotten: Born and Bred bungles a promising subject with an overreliance on suspiciously on-the-nose, thesis-spouting talking heads.
Rotten: [Frimmer's] meandering, repetitive interviews dilute the sport's intensity, while his rigorously linear approach buries the suspense.
Customer Reviews
Smart, raw and well-executed.
A lot of documentary films these days are big-budgeted, glossed-up attempts at changing your political persuasion. This is not one of them. Born and Bred is shot with an old-school, straight-ahead attitude but filled with a complex texture of stories that defy easy judgment.
Part historical documentation, part entertainment, part boxing wisdom and part ring violence, the film follows the young lives of a handful of East Los Angeles fighters as they try to break out of the local barrio and make a name for themselves as the next boxing superstar.
The core of the film is inhabited by a pair of adolescent boxers, the Molina twins, and their lifelong trainer, Robert, who commands much of the screen presence throughout the documentary. What starts out as multitudes of gyms filled with young fighters as young as eight, slowly distills to the unique, tender world of one boxer and his trainer. The film is as much about the complex culture of raising kids to fight as it is about grown men seeking to develop the raw potential that they were never able to develop in their own lives.
While Born and Bred is not the blockbuster of shock or immigration controversy that you want it to ideally be, it is, on a more real level, about the fractured lives that seem to make boxers fight for what they fight for, day-in and day-out. The nonstop footage of training and fights, which at first begins to wear on your expectations of high drama in boxing, evolves into a larger awareness of the deeper struggles in the characters' lives.
By the end of the film, the shock comes not from the fact that kids are raised to fight as much as the reality of what a kid must go through to make it in the sport. The overall story inspires as much as it provokes questions about why anyone would choose to put their kids in such a sport. Whatever your position on it is, or what kind of neighborhood you are from, it leaves you with the feeling that life is a tough fight and you are better off, at least if you want to make it in this country, learning the raw skills to know how to hit and to not get hit.
Inspiring. Unique window into the culture.
Inspiring documentary. Definitely a world I've never seen. Had a lot to the film in the complexity of the lives and the way it was edited. Interesting take on immigration fight.
Born And Bred
First rate Doc!!!
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