At the beginning of Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams' BBC-funded documentary Gaea Girls, aspiring female pro wrestler Saika Takeuchi talks about how wrestlers in the ring are "so alive, they shine," and how much she wants to be one so she can be someone, be noticed. The sentiments are fairly generic, even banal, but in light of the rest of Gaea Girls, they take on a tragic, riveting weight entirely out of proportion to their denotative meaning. "Gaea Girls" is a theatrical outfit that resembles a small-scale Japanese version of GLOW: Glorious Women Of Wrestling without the exposed buttocks. The group's bouts look as hokey and choreographed as any WWF match: One fight featuring Gaea Girls trainer Chigusa Nagayo involves props and fire-breathing alongside the usual pile-driver moves, flashy costumes, and dramatic leaps. But training for those matches is a brutal, violent process that Longinotto and Williams document almost entirely in a hands-off verité style. The film's first half feels scattershot and disorganized, as it jumps between lengthy segments of the trainers and trainees wrestling, exercising, and joking with each other. But as several recruits drop out of the program, the film focuses more and more exclusively on Takeuchi, whose slight frame hardly seems up to the bone-rattling rigors of her training regimen. Nagayo, who admits in a rare interview segment that she thinks of her recruits as her children and later discusses how she learned everything about her style from her abusive father, punches, slaps, kicks, and verbally abuses her charges to try to make them tough, desperate, and determined. Her would-be wrestlers slam into each other and the mat until they're covered with sweat, blood, and usually tears. Takeuchi in particular breaks down again and again, begging for second chances but otherwise unable to respond forcefully either to attacks or questions. The documentary's rawness—its handheld cameras, lack of snappy editing or music, and lengthy, realistically wandering scenes—conveys the rawness of the fighting itself, particularly its lack of form, grace, style, or mercy. Longinotto and Williams provide no context, and virtually no introduction to the subjects, who rarely acknowledge the cameras. But Takeuchi's ordeal is still compelling and horrifying. Her breakdowns, Nagayo's well-meaning cruelties, and the other trainees' silent, complicit horror make Gaea Girls emotionally wracking, exhausting, and real in ways that a more polished and packaged documentary couldn't. It's hard to understand Takeuchi's motivations, but it's impossible to not feel her pain.