Pelada

Last night at CineBarre in Mountlake Terrace there was a showing of the football movie Pelada and a Q&A with one of the makers.

It’s an independent documentary that’s been doing the indie movie circuit for a little while now. This was its first showing in Seattle and was well worth the effort.

It’s about how the game of football is universal, how all it takes is a ball and you’ve a game that crosses cultures and languages. Four young Americans spend time in 25 different cultures getting involved in pickup and organized games. There are no professionals, no manicured pitches, just football and people that the game is a way of life for.

There were games in Argentina against old men that have played every Sunday morning for decades, on the beach in Brazil, on top of buildings in Japan, against bootleggers in Nigeria, the street in China, inside a prison in Bolivia and a ghetto in Buenos Aires that the police had advised them to stay out of.

There were a couple of rather telling segments. Playing as a woman in Iraq and the slums in Nigeria big deals, but most notable was the games in Israel. FIFA loves to play on the notion that football can unite people across political or social boundaries. Pick-up games in the middle of Jerusalem show this to be total nonsense.

The group found a field that was used by mostly Jewish players, but as the evening went on some Arab players turned up. The rules were simple and used all over the world, 5v5, 10 minute games and the winner stays on. The evening they were there was a couple of days after a Palestinian hijacked a piece of construction equipment and killed a number of Israelis and tension was high.

You could feel the tension when the Jews and Arabs were playing each other. Perhaps the most telling line of the movie came from one of the Jewish players, he was asked about the game, playing Arabs and crossing boundaries. He answered “although there are some people who try to portray football as being above politics, above all tensions, it’s bull. We will play with them, but we hate them.”

Pelada is a good independent documentary, and worth the effort to search out.