at Ciné Lumière, the Austrian Cultural Forum London,
the Hungarian Cultural Centre, the Italian Cultural Institute,
the Lithuanian Embassy and University College London
To celebrate the upcoming Olympic Games, the 5th edition of the European Documentary Festival, entitled Ready Steady Doc!, will tackle contrasting points of view and the various ways of experiencing and filming sports. From the Homeless World Cup to the disappearing Rimet Trophy, from a four-year-old marathon runner to an 83-year-old pole vaulter, these films have many fascinating stories to tell.
An impressive line-up of sport celebrities will attend: the manager of the Spanish National Football Team Vicente del Bosque, French football star Vikash Dhorasoo, five time Serie A Italian football champion Marco Tardelli, Hungarian three-time water-polo Olympic champion György Kárpáti, European senior vice-champion in pole-vault Herbert Sepp, 83-year-old Belgian Olympic athlete Yvonne Van Bets, and more!
No less than seven documentaries will focus on football. Individual players are celebrated, such as Czech footballer Antonin Panenka in Panenka Against the Rest of the World, which includes famous archive footage from the 1976 European Championship. Other documentaries will take a broader view, highlighting the cooperation of a team as a whole: for instance, Danish Dynamite follows the Danish National Football Team’s rise to glory, culminating in their triumph in the 1992 European Championship. Similarly, The Soul of the Reds shows various moments of the Spanish football team’s history, using anecdotes and interviews with important personalities of the Spanish football scene. Substitute offers a more intimate view of a football team’s day to day life, as footballer Vikash Dhorasoo makes the most of his time on the sidelines by filming behind-the-scenes moments of the French football team’s preparation for the 2006 World Cup. Two documentaries, Australia and Kick-Off, will center on the 2008 Homeless World Cup in Melbourne, Australia. Finally, many football fans will have heard of the disappearance of the previous world cup, known as the Rimet Trophy, in 1983, but few people know the incredible and mysterious events surrounding it. This will all change, thanks to The Rimet Trophy.
Other sports also feature prominently in our selection of documentaries, starring often atypical athletes, such as 83-year-old Herbert Sepp, Estonia’s best professional pole-vaulter in his age group, who is the main focus of World Champion. Another highly unusual hero will star in Marathon Boy: four-year-old Budhia Singh, who is plucked from an Indian slum by his coach and trained to become India’s greatest runner. To The Limit follows German brothers Alexander and Thomas Huber on their attempt to break a speed climbing record up the 1000-metre high towering rock face of ‘El Capitán.’ Sabas offers an intimate portrait of Arvydas Sabonis, the greatest Lithuanian basketball player of all time. Going back to 1956, Freedom’s Fury, the award winning feature documentary produced by Quentin Tarantino, tells the story of the ‘Bloodiest Game in Olympic History,’ the infamous water polo showdown between Hungary and the Soviets at the Melbourne Olympics. London 1948 – War & Olympics captures the reminiscences of the former Belgian Olympic team as they are shown footage of the 1948 Olympics, in which they fared very well. For picturesque settings of the Carpathian mountain region and spectacular shots of snowboarding jumps, audiences will discover the gripping From Romania with Love.
www.europeandocfestival.org.uk
Ready Steady Doc! is a joint project of EUNIC London (European Union National Institutes for Culture), supported by the European Commission Representation in the UK. This year’s European Documentary Festival is a partnership between the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Czech Centre, the Embassy of Denmark, the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the UK, the Estonian Embassy in London, Flanders House, the Goethe Institut, the Hungarian Cultural Centre London, the Institut français du Royaume-Uni, the Instituto Cervantes, the Embassy of Spain, the Italian Cultural Institute London, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and UCL.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
