To mark the biggest event of the year --no, not Cannes--, let's look at the other big F.
Football fan Wim Wenders recently gave his analysis and prediction: He'd be happy to see Brazil win, believes in the power of the young German team, and even thinks Belgium has a chance. Asked which players he'll be keeping an eye on (from the roof-top big screen of his Berlin apartment), he noted Messi, Götze, and Özil.
Count on Berlin, site of the historic 2006 World Cup, to bring culture into play in the International Soccer Film Festival: "Football and film have discovered that they have a lot in common. Football films depict the social and cultural background of the sport all over the world, its
unique ability to simultaneously signify norms and rebellion, riches and poverty, solidarity and fanaticism. It's an ideal métier for storytelling. The sport is full of wonderful images, sympathy and antipathy with protagonists, bitter defeats, tragic heroes. Football contains the sort of archetypes and figures of identification needed to tell cinematic stories."
Let's travel back in cinematic and athletic time & space for a moment...
Do you remember the World Cup 1994 in Los Angeles? Almost 2 billion people followed the kick-off live on television, and German director Andi Rogenhagen, along with 40 colleagues, captured the most decisive moments in his global documentary
"The Final Kick". On screen, we travel to a Dominican monastery in the Czech Republic, sit in front of a mega-screen at the train station in Beijing, visit the harem of the most famous folk singer in Cameroon, the fish market in Seoul, and a prison in Minsk.
Director and ex-soccer player Sönke Wortmann (see photo) gained unprecedented access to
Klinsmann's German team during the World Cup in Germany in 2006, a sports event that reshaped how the country looks at itself. 100 hours of film, between the dressing room and secret training camps. Wortmann approached it like an "animal documentary“, "slowly and carefully approaching the species“ --the international soccer pro that is.
The doc premiered at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in front of 2000 people, among them the team and Chancellor Angela Merkel.
It wasn't Wortmann's first foray into the genre. His 2003 thoughtful feature film
“The Miracle of Bern” tells the dramatic story of Germany's 1954 first post-war championship-winning soccer team. The film won the Prix du Public UBS Locarno among others and led to much debate about Germany's repositioning in the world after Nazism.
Deutsche Welle shows what serious stuff soccer is to fans around the world:
Kick off! - Special: Champions League - The German Final 2013. Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich met in London's Wembley Stadium to decide who the best team in Europe is today. You get to relive the first ever all-German Champions League Final with the two clubs that have ruled the Bundesliga for the past years.
Finally, in Sebastian Grobler's 2011 comedy
"Lessons of a Dream“, Daniel Brühl takes us back to where and when it all began. Based on a real story, he plays an exitable young English teacher, who brings soccer from England to Germany in the late 19th century.
And what if there was an
uber-World Cup movie?
THR has already cast this uncanny team, starring
Andrew Garfield as Thomas Muller, Kevin Costner as Jurgen Klinsmann and Christian Bale as Lionel Messi.
Whether you're watching the games or the films: May the best team win (It wouldn't hurt of course if it was Germany after all this time. Let's hope Manuel Neuer isn't afraid like in
Wim Wenders' 1972 "The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty".)
by Jutta Brendemühl
