The concept for this project was very simple. My aim was to watch and critique a film from every country that is competing in this year’s World Cup of association football. While conceptually this project may seem simple, in regards to its’ execution it was anything but. A great deal of thought, research and planning was required to complete this project and trust me finishing it was far more difficult than starting it. Probably the first issue that I had to confront was determining what would make a film identifiable with a certain country. For this project, I preferred to watch a film that was directed by a person (or persons) from the featured country, so that the film that I select would represent the vision and ambition of a native citizen. I also preferred a film that was shot in the featured country, so that I could see the country itself while watching the film. I also desired films were the cast of performers were largely comprised from the featured country, so that its’ own acting talent was put on display. With this last qualification I wasn’t so strict as to require the entire cast to be from a given country, because honestly this would probably make the project nearly impossible to pull off. Granted I still preferred films where the leads and prominent characters were predominately played by performers from the featured country.
Beyond this though there were still a number of potential issues that I had to deal with at the onset of this project. Below is a list of such conundrums, in the order in which they occurred:
1. Wait!, I have to find a film that was made in Qatar?!?
2. I only get to choose 1 film from each country! While Qatar and other smaller, less cinematically inclined nations posed issues in terms of even finding one film; other nations like the United States, France or Japan offer such a vast and diverse array of films to choose from that it felt kind of silly to only select one movie from each of these nations. And that’s to say nothing about how I might go about picking a film from, say India; a country that would offer so much to choose from that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Generally there are no overriding themes with my selections. No one should interpret my selections as representing what I think is the best film from a certain country, nor even what I think is the most representative film from a certain county. I simply needed one film from a country that fit within my previously stated criteria. For some countries I gravitated towards the work of a famous auteur, while in other countries I felt inclined to dig deeper into the country’s cinematic output. Over the course of the project I also wanted to achieve a certain diversity and balance in my selections. One understated aim that emerged during this project was to construct a broader conceptualization of the breadth of global film culture, and this aim may be reflected in some of my selections.
3. This film is too ‘international’ to be considered. Here’s a fun question to ask a cinephile, what country is most responsible for the film The Man Who Would Be King? The two primary actors Sean Connery and Michael Caine were British. It was directed by John Huston, an American, and featured a supporting cast that included Canadian Christopher Plummer and Indian Saeed Jaffrey. It was mostly filmed in Morocco with other scenes being filmed on location in France. It also used a lot of Moroccan actors as extras for the film. The screenplay was largely written by Americans and yet was adapted from the work of Rudyard Kipling, a British national who was born in India. As great as this movie is there is no way I could include such a film in this series, since so many countries can legitimately stake a claim to its production. Even with my modest criteria, this project does narrow the amount of films that could potentially be selected. And if this wasn’t enough according to the FIFA view of the world Sean Connery and Michael Caine are from different countries as well. Years ago I happened to watch a proper ‘British’ film called Late Night Shopping that I liked enough to consider selecting for this series. Then I did some research into its production details and found that it used a largely English cast while being filmed in Glasgow by a Scottish director, rendering it as ‘unselectable’. Thanks FIFA!
4. Will this country even make it to the World Cup? I started this project over 3 years ago which gave me the advantage of having more time to complete the work and publish the critiques close to the actual event itself. The biggest disadvantage in doing this however was that back in 2019 I had no idea who would even qualify for the event. If that wasn’t enough I also did not anticipate the occurrence of a global pandemic which would disrupt the timing of the qualification matches. That turned out to be a rather minor annoyance that didn’t prevent me from knocking off most of the usual suspects. It’s almost a given that Brazil and Argentina will qualify for every World Cup for the foreseeable future. Most of the larger countries in Europe are usually safe bets to qualify. Although the fact that Netherlands and Italy failed to qualify in 2018 made me a bit cautious about rampaging too much through European cinema in the early stages of my planning. There are also other countries like Mexico and Japan who may not be the best football nations in the world, but are usually heavily favored to qualify from their continental confederations. Once you get past these countries, you start facing a large concoction of countries that either ‘usually, but don’t always’ qualify; surprisingly qualified for the last tournament; or were highly ranked despite the fact that they typically don’t qualify at all which leaves you more dependent on the actual results of the qualification matches. The last thing I wanted to do was write a critique for a certain country only to have it miss the tournament entirely and with my luck I actually expected this to happen a couple of times. I also found myself rooting ardently for countries with rich and vibrant film cultures which would make this easier to complete. For instance when it came to the Asian qualifiers, I was really hoping Iran would advance, due to all the great films that get produced in that country. And I’ll be honest I was a little worried about them after a couple losses in their initial qualification round, but alas they made it in which made me happy.
5. This film is too ‘inaccessible’. Thanks to the power of the Internet, doing the necessary research to find a suitable selection from each country was rather easy. The Internet however was far less effective at circumventing the market inefficiencies of global film distribution. I would have to say that the single most depressing aspect of executing this project was serendipitously discovering the extent to which foreign film culture remains out of one’s reach. This was a harsh lesson in how so much of what can be called ‘corporate culture’ is marketed to an audience and not actually designed to be found or discovered by mere chance. And look, it’s bad enough that there are thousands upon thousands of films that I will never watch because life is too short, but I can’t properly capture in words alone the frustration in not being able to watch certain films largely to do circumstances outside of my control. This is made even more irritating by the fact that I have access to a vast communication infrastructure which allows me to be socially conscious of such films, with many of these films initially appearing as potentially intriguing to watch. Certain countries offered challenges to access that I did not expect, like Portugal for instance. For some inexplicable reason North American distribution for Portuguese cinema has been a bit sparse. The film that I choose from that country was actually my fourth choice, since I literally could not get access to any of my initial choices. This lead me to include some of the struggles that I encountered with access as a complement to the critiques themselves. Despite all of this I was able to plow forward and complete the work. What follows are the individual chapters of this cinematic journey.