Kite Fighting Is Cool. And Terrifying.

“I think everyone should have wings… …just like the birds.”

Here’s a brief (but great) little video on Soltar Pipas, or kite fighting, which is one of Brazil’s most popular sports — after football, that is…er, by which I mean “futbol”.

 In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, flying the pipa is more than a leisurely escape from on-the-ground realities—it’s a venue for battle, with the entire sky as the arena. Pipa designs and airborne “cutting” strategies have been passed through generations, from rooftop to rooftop. Filmmakers Guilherme Tensol and Leandro HBL spent time in Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, among its young pipa warriors and elder statesmen, absorbing their secrets and documenting their stories.

That video (and accompanying article) was part of the 4th season of The Gray Lady’s Op-Docs series, “a forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with creative latitude by independent filmmakers and artists.” Lots of great stuff in there. (I especially love the way the sport works as such a great metaphor for the challenges faced by its practitioners. And I’m fascinated by the fact that the practice is simultaneously so ethereal and so brutal.)

I have this vivid (but not terribly detailed) recollection of reading a short story in my youth that involved kite fighting. Vivid, because I can remember so clearly the images it painted on my imagination, even down to the shards of glass on the kite string and the leather gloves protecting its protagonist’s hands. But not terribly detailed because I cannot remember its name, for the life of me. (No, it’s not “The Kite Runner.” I’m way older than that. And “The Kite Fighters” is much too recent, as well.)

OK, fine. This is a little FWP, isn’t it? I’ll be quiet now. (But if anyone knows what it is, I’m desperate to know.)

Attribution(s): “Maanja making” by Faiyaz Hawawala (Own work) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons; Kite at Gasworks Park via photopin (license)