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Like an anthropologist, Julika Rudelius has portrayed managers, tough boys, young women, immigrants, millionaires and ageing ladies. Now she has filmed young Americans with leadership ambitions. In earlier works she often appeared as the interviewer: visible or audible, sometimes off-screen. But now the camera is doing the work; as a director Rudelius is practically invisible.

Rites of Passage is only partly about politics – like Rudelius’ other works that only partially treat subjects like sex, power, money or beauty. It is most of all a study of behaviour that is evoked and maintained as soon as a person finds himself within a specific group and environment, where actions seem to derive their meaning from specific rituals.