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Abbas Suan of B’nei Sakhnin

two radically different documentary films premier at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York

Sons of Pigs. Just one of countless derogatory names spit at the players and fans of the professional soccer team of Sakhnin, Israel, an Arab town within a Jewish nation, and the subject of the first of two soccer documentaries I caught this weekend at the 6th annual Tribeca Film Festival. There is not rational, personal fault or tangible reason for such names, cultural geography alone heats the atmosphere, condensing hate and raining violence upon Sakhnin and its sons.

Sons of Sakhnin United, a documentary film about a soccer team, is a symbol, just as the crest on a jersey, a flag, a scarf is a symbol. There is much more than what you can see on the surface.

Just as the team, a poorly funded group of Arabs, Jews, and “foreigners” transcended sport by winning the Israeli Premier League Title in 2004, becoming a symbol for a something more hopeful than what everything, everything, else has been able to offer the most famous global hotbed of cultural difference, historical tension, and religious vanity, the filmmakers have created more than a historical document, transcending the basics of journalism and entertainment by creating an imprint of an intangible string of moments that resonates now years after the fact.

The cultural and political unification wrought by sports is often fleeting. The resignation of B’nei Sakhnin’s cup-winning coach the following and nearly relegated season speaks to that, as does the daily reality that not much really changes after the tickertape has been wiped from the earth along with the nearly absent Israeli topsoil in the Mediterranean wind. What a documentary film has the ability to do is carry that inspiration into the future, its dissemination allowing the voices, in this case those of the team’s captain Abbas Suan, the impassioned fans living vicariously through the wins and losses, and the masses of angered activists chanting their epithets anywhere there are ears to hear them, to resonant against the cliché, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Two years after winning the cup, B’nei Sakhnin was relegated down to the state league, but with the help of new financial backing attracted by their unique story, the team will be returning to the Premier League next season (info not covered on the film, and something maybe to add as a postscript because it’s the first and most obvious question with this and most any documentary, to again try to capture the hearts and minds of not only a nation but a world that needs to know there is possibilities of peace behind the physical and psychological walls we build between us. If lightning can strike twice in one place, only time will tell, but with Sons of Sakhnin United, we can rewind and pause, even if only to be hopeful of hope.

Soccer partially delivers the narrative for the gritty visuals of the film, shot in an Errol Morris-style without narration by Christopher Browne, Alexander Browne, Roger Bennett, Alexander H. Browne, and Michael Cohen. If not before from stories of the likes of The Ivory Coast National Team (my personal favorite when it comes to soccer transcending the sport), here soccer also delivers the public an argument for why this sport looms larger than any other.

The film observes without laying blame or segregating the characters as is done in the greater society. The cinematography mimics the geography, with past, present, and progress converging – reminding me of the work of Fernando Meirelles without quite the color. But that too made sense. For one, this is documentary not feature work, so you work with what you’ve got, but too the earthiness is nice compliment in that the cultural intersection of the world that held this soccer team is anything but bright or glossy. Everything is subdued under the pressure of political gnashing of teeth and the sandblasted air. Which pollutes more is left up to eye of the beholder.

The Power of the Game

Whereas the creators of Sons of Sakhnin Unitedchose one of the many inspirational soccer stories to investigate, the other soccer film at Tribeca Film Festival took the opposite approach. Director Michael Apted (of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist, Nell, and The World is Not Enough) and National Geographic Films submitted The Power of the Game, a film featuring a half-dozen vignettes centered around last year’s World Cup. It is this for main difference – the same reason I prefer a several thousand-word feature story to a magazine front-of-book section – that Apted’s documentary paled in comparison to its counterpart. Each of Apted’s subjects – US MNT/Sam’s Army, Senegalese and Argentine street soccer with pro athlete support, racism in soccer, South Africa 2010, and Iranian soccer in a feminine context – could have been the 5,000 word feature, especially the Iranian angle which featured the intelligently heroic Mahin Gorji, a female journalist fighting the oppression in her homeland by covering her favorite sport. Her presence on camera was striking, her eyes exploding in cerebral anguish. A short glimpse into an Iranian women’s soccer team while filming Gorji also begged for deeper investigation.

The film’s summary describes the stories as intertwined, but other than them having something to do with Germany in the summer of 2006, they never converge or properly intertwine, a climax that could have made up for the otherwise peripatetic storylines. The presence of an intermittent narrator trying to tie up the main points furthered my attention to the lack of cohesion, as if I was watching trailers for other films, not the feature presentation.

The film’s failure, and the caveat to my criticism, is largely in the soccer audience, for which the stories and their outcomes are mostly well known. Just as National Geographic Magazine’s pre-World Cup cover story gave the general public some context for the passion, conflict, and intensity that surrounds getting to and competing in the world’s largest sporting event, but hadn’t brought much truly original reporting, their film targets the unknowledgeable, the passé. The highlights from USA-Mexico in Columbus, for example, a game I attended, invoked no less emotion within me – that Beasley left foot came right at me standing behind the goal, but I couldn’t help feel this film was dated before it premiered. It’s as if National Geographic put together the Superbowl highlight DVD you get with your Sports Illustrated subscription. That lasting imprint achieved by Sons of Sakhnin United, was not here.

The production of The Power of the Game was everything we have come to expect from National Geographic. Exquisite photography, crisp camera work, informative editing, nothing cutting edge or surprising. Think PBS, not HBO. Looking at the two films side by side, one could argue the polarities between the filmmakers of the two films – Sons was independently produced by a few young men with little filmmaking experience, while Power had the aging famous director and financial backing from media players – came through visually in their product. Apted’s tended toward the classical with his short brush strokes, while Browne worked fast, agitated, as if his strokes were with a spray can, his mural only clear after the air clears. Generational and personal taste will dictate which you prefer.

If we learned anything from the two soccer films at Tribeca Film Festival, it’s that the power of the game is not so easily summarized, and National Geographic might have stumbled upon in this soccer screening coincidence a few new filmmakers worthy of the Yellow Border.