Keep track of all The SunBreak’s festival coverage on our SIFF 2013 page.
SIFF will present 272 feature films this year and only 3 of them are principally concerned with sports. While I hold out hope that “An Evening with Kyle MacLachlan” will focus on his youth golfing career in Yakima, I suspect that this will not be the case. Three nights — 1.1 percent of the festival’s entries — are all you get, sports fans. (Note: SIFF lists seven movies under the genre of “Sports,” but the other four are about: trapeze, mountain climbing, big wave surfing, and chess. HA!) Yes, a rant is coming, but only after I tell you about the three actual sports films.
The Trials of Muhammad Ali
This documentary focuses on Muhammad Ali’s conversion to Islam and subsequent refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. The doc sounds unreasonably broad to me — to try to cover this much ground in 92 minutes is impossible. Consider that the stellar When We Were Kings, the best boxing documentary of all-time, focused on a single fight. The doc promises never-before-seen footage and chats with Ali intimates, so if you are an Ali admirer this is worth a look.
May 25 in Renton. June 7 at Uptown. June 8 at the Egyptian.
Little Lion
Boy meets dream, boy loses dream, boy gets dream back. This drama is about Mitri, a Senegalese teenager who falls under the influence of a crooked soccer scout and pays his way to a supposed tryout camp in France only to find out it was all a scam. Luckily Mitri meets up with an Odd But Brilliant Coach With Nothing To Lose (that would be your Mr. Miyagi character) whose (presumably) unorthodox methods could help Mitri find soccer stardom after all! These kind of movies are so predictable but so damn awesome. This is the one sports movie I’ll see.
May 27 at Pacific Place
The Crash Reel
The story of Kevin Pearce, a competitive snowboarder who gave himself a traumatic brain injury trying to perfect an insane stunt that would get him to the 2012 Olympics. It’s billed as “a sobering counterpoint to the flash and hype of events like the X Games,” but the promotional image is a snowboarder soaring through the air, sooo…. I have to say, I don’t really even consider competitive snowboarding a sport, I’m including this only because the Olympics does. If you care about snowboarding you will probably enjoy this; director Lucy Walker made a magnificent film called The Waste Land about the trashpickers of Rio de Janeiro, and I’d imagine this film will be similarly unflinching.
May 31 at the Harvard Exit. June 2 at the Egyptian.
RANT (no charge):
Have you ever picked up a newspaper? If you have, you’ll notice that there is a section called “Sports.” You know this. Perhaps you don’t know this: Of the top ten highest-rated U.S. television programs in 2012, nine were sporting events. It’s not just an American phenomenon. A sporting event is the most-watched television program in the history in all of these countries: Australia (2005 Australian Open Tennis Final), Canada (2012 Olympics Gold Medal Hockey Game), India (2011 Cricket World Cup Final), Germany (2010 World Cup Semifinal), New Zealand (2011 Rugby World Cup), Philippines (Boxing: Pacquiao vs. Morales), and the United Kingdom (1966 World Cup Final). And yet, only three movies at SIFF have to do, even peripherally, with this key part of world culture.
No offense to such worthy cultural endeavors as music (23 SIFF movies), art/design (15 SIFF movies), and dance (9 SIFF movies), but are any of these as culturally relevant to the mass of humanity as sports? Music, maybe, but 10.7 *times* as culturally relevant? Newspaper sales and TV ratings say no.
I’m not sure who is to blame here. If filmmakers are avoiding the topic of sports they are only hurting themselves. What’s the number one documentary of all-time, according to the International Documentary Association? The basketball doc Hoop Dreams. What won the 2012 Oscar for Best Documentary? The football doc Undefeated. Who holds the all-time record for hits in a single season? Ichiro.
