The eighth edition of Offiside Fest, the soccer documentary film festival, starts tomorrow with the premiere of ‘The Fort’, a documentary about the worst team in Britain that can be seen in theaters Maldà of Barcelona. The festival will consist of eight documentaries in a hybrid format, with a part of the programming in face-to-face format and another online through the platform ”of the movie‘.
This year, festival goers will be able to enjoy ‘Club Ibiza: The Sessions’ in Maldà cinemas. It is a short-format docuseries that collects the epic history of UD Ibiza, which in three seasons has climbed three divisions to play today in LaLiga SmartBank, the Spanish Second Division.
These are the eight documentaries confirmed in the eighth edition of the Offside Festival 2021 that will kick off tomorrow with The Fort.
1. ‘Big Time Soccer: The Remarkable Rise & Fall of the NASL’ (Rachel Viollet, USA, 2021)
It chronicles the rise and fall of the NASL, the pioneering North American football (soccer) league. Throughout the 70s and 80s he managed to attract the Yankee public to a sport that they did not understand and he did so through the arrival of numerous legends from the rest of the footballing globe such as Pelé, Johan Cruyff, Beckenbauer and George Best. Portrait of a unique time and of a league that updated old rules and introduced new ones to make soccer a more spectacular sport.
2. ‘The Boy’s Dreams – Pro In Africa’ (Emil Moberg Lundén, Sweden, 2020)
The director of the documentary, Emil, after spending 10 years retired from football and dedicated to teaching, decides to go back to being a professional footballer. The only team that accepts it is the Kibera Black Stars, a team from a poor neighborhood in Kenya. There, Emil will face the challenge of becoming the first European player in the Kenyan Premier League.
3. ‘Tattoo your dreams’ (Mehdi Ganji, Iran / Spain, 2021)
The documentary explores the dreams of a group of teenagers from Iran who are struggling to become professional footballers in Spain, in LaLiga. Coming from different regions of the country, they all share the illusion of playing in the best league in the world and showing that they can rise to the challenge.
4. ‘Foosballers’ (Joe Heslinga, USA, 2019)
The portrait of six unique characters: six professional foosball players competing to be the best in the world. The documentary is a very eclectic and fun gallery about the competitive world of table football. A ballroom sport that had its heyday in the United States during the 70s and since the advent of video games, has been in full decline. The goal of these table football professionals is to reclaim the space they once had.
5. ‘The Fort’ (Alex Gale, UK, 2019)
Fort Williams FC is the worst team in Great Britain. No doubt. He is last in the Scottish fifth division with a score of -7 points. They have not won for more than two years; shame and pain take over the squad and the club. This BBC documentary chronicles the struggles of a small club to survive, as well as the efforts of a new board determined to turn things around.
6. ‘Everton: Howard’s Way’ (Rob Sloman, Reino Unido, 2019)
The definitive story about the best stage in the history of Everton, the other great Liverpool club. During the 1980s, Everton was able to rise to the top of English football. He went on to win the league twice under the charismatic Mr. Howard Kendall. They also won the FA Cup, destroyed Manchester United 5-0 and managed to break the record for points in a season. ‘Everton: Howard’s Way’ narrates the trajectory, through the memories and experiences of its protagonists, of a man to whom Everton ran through his veins and of a team of players full of greatness and effort.
7. ‘Basil’ (Roman Shirman, Ucrania, 2020)
An atypical biopic, full of imagination and ingenuity, which vindicates the figure of Oleh Bazylevych, one of the best players remembered by the most veteran Dynamo Kiev fans. When ‘Bazyl’ became the coach of his lifelong team, he did so as a duo with the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskyi. With them, Dinamo achieved international success. Bazylevych stood out thanks to his modern methods and an intellectual personality. Something that always made him a rare bird in the world of Soviet football and brought him more problems than benefits before the political-sports authorities of the former USSR.
8. ‘Identity’ (José Carlos García, Carlos Granda, Peru, 2019)
An introspective journey about what it means to be born in Peru in the early 1980s, when the worst economic, social and political crisis in its history began. This trip results in a look, perhaps hopeful, at a recent moment of change and social transformation whose essence was reflected in the return of the Peruvian team to the maximum continental competition after 36 years of absence, when it qualified to compete in the World Cup. Russia Football 2018.