09 July 2008

Sports Films Make Strong Showing at U.S. Film Festival

Documentaries chronicle Olympics, football, boxing and baseball

 

Night view of the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, which was constructed for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Built by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, it can seat up to 91,000 spectators.

Night view of the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, which was constructed for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

By David Minckler
Special Correspondent

Silver Spring, Maryland -- Sports films made a strong showing at Silverdocs, one of America’s most respected documentary film festivals, with two films focusing on the upcoming Olympics in Beijing.  Other films looked at boxing, synchronized swimming, a baseball league in Israel, women’s football (soccer) in the United States and Iran, and a football competition among homeless men.

This year, Silverdocs featured 108 films from 63 countries, including 10 sports films, and drew more than 22,000 attendees at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Silver Spring, Maryland -- a suburb of Washington -- and other venues.  (See “More International Films Shown at U.S. Documentary Film Fest.”)

One of the winning films at Silverdocs 2008 was The Red Race by Chinese director Chao Gan, which received a special jury mention in the world feature competition for its unblinking look at the grueling gymnastics training of young children at the Lu Wan District Youth Athletic School in Shanghai, China.  Many of the children come from rural provinces in hopes of finding opportunities not available in the countryside, but the obstacles, including often harsh training, are daunting.  The film shows the human toll of China’s passion for gymnastics.

Chao spoke about the film after its showing, saying he had shown the finished film to the school gymnastics trainers and was surprised they had approved it because the trainers occasionally seemed cruel. But when the school authorities saw the film, they asked Chao to edit out some of its content. He refused.  When asked whether The Red Race ever would be aired on CCTV, Chinese state television, Chao said he doubted that the version seen at the festival would be accepted for broadcast.

Another festival film that looked at China’s preparation for the Olympics was Bird's Nest: Herzog and De Meuron in China, directed by the Swiss team of Christopher Schaub and Michael Schindhelm.  “Bird's Nest” is the nickname the Chinese gave the National Stadium as it began to take shape, mainly because the concrete wall of the arena is wrapped in a latticework of crisscrossing columns and beams. The stadium, which will host the main track and field competitions as well as the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies, was built by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

The stadium and the National Aquatics Center “are as innovative as any architecture on the planet,” according to a recent article in The New Yorker magazine.

The documentary follows the intricate collaborations and negotiations between the architects, contractors, Chinese officials and others in the building of the stadium, which involved bridging two very different cultures.

Director Christopher Schaub told a Silverdocs audience that his interest in making the film “was based on the exchange between culture and architecture -- that you learn something about architecture through the consultation of two cultures, the European and Chinese cultures.”

Schaub began filming during the groundbreaking ceremony in December 2003 and continued over four years with eight or nine visits to the site.  He said de Meuron and Herzog, who created the Allianz Stadium in Munich, Germany, for the 2006 World Cup, “are very interested in the cultural context” as they develop a design.

“We speak in Switzerland about the de Meuron and Herzog method,” Schaub said.  “It means you work with several persons, also with artists, to work out the right design for this situation in China, which would be a different situation from San Francisco or Munich or someplace else.”

He said that once the directors obtained permission from Chinese officials to go onto the construction site, “we were quite free” to film.  Schaub also said that there have been protests in China over expenditures for the stadium and other Olympics buildings and concern over their post-Olympics use.  “This Bird’s Nest is for one event, maybe after that the Chinese people will use it -- but that’s a hope,” said Schaub.

Football Under Cover chronicles a match between Iranian and German women’s football teams in 2006 in Tehran.

The film has not yet been shown publicly in China, he said.

A DESIRE TO PLAY FOOTBALL

Also shown at Silverdocs was Football Under Cover, co-directed by German David Assmann and Iranian Ayat Najafi, which chronicles a friendly match between a German women’s football team and the Iranian Women's National Football Team, which under strict Iranian law never may compete, only practice -- and only in a closed arena, wearing headscarves, with only female spectators.  The director was told the film could not be shown in Iran.

“Making a film about it,” said Assmann in a press release, “gave us the chance to organize the whole thing within an official framework.”  The film documents the twists and turns before and during the match as a result of the restrictions imposed by the Iranian authorities.  Regardless of these difficulties, Football Under Cover does not dwell on the usual clichés and stereotypes associated with Iran -- the strict theocracy.  Instead, it concentrates on what the game with the Germans means to the Iranian women.

The match was played in 2006 in Tehran’s Ararat Stadium. For the Iranians, it was “a means of fighting and of showing that they won't be tied down,” said Najafi. “Women's football in Iran represents a battle for freedom.”

These were the other festival films about sports:

-- Kicking It, which follows the football teams of homeless people from Afghanistan, Ireland, Kenya, Russia, Spain and the United States as they compete in the 2006 Homeless World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa.

-- Kick Like a Girl, about a Utah girls' football team that enters the boys' league to get a taste of competition.

-- Holy Land Hardball, about the unlikely formation of the Israel Baseball League by a bakery owner from Boston with no prior sports management experience.

-- Sync or Swim, about the training of the 2004 U.S. Olympic synchronized swimming team.

-- The Champ, about a 17-year-old Mexican-American girl in the boxing ring.

-- Kassim the Dream, about Kassim Ouma, born in Uganda, kidnapped at age 6 to become a child soldier, who immigrated to America to become a champion boxer.

-- Comeback, about German boxer Jurgen Hartenstein, a former middleweight champion, who tries to make a comeback at age 35.

Silverdocs is sponsored by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel. This year’s festival was held June 16-23. For more details, see the Silverdocs Web site.