Is there something particularly American about a soccer-themed film festival? Maybe, some mused during a panel at Tuesday night’s opening night of Kicking and Screening, just such an event, and one celebrating its eighth edition.
“Soccer culture’s been a convergence of the jock-y person I was and the art scene I’m into now,” said Dan Funderburgh, a New York-based artist.
Indeed, the festival – held this year at midtown Manhattan’s Scandinavia House — felt like a laid-back and informal meet-up among friends from different, but related, circles. Attendees donned both business suits and Fred Perry polos, Euro-styled jorts and carefully positioned hats (or should we say “headwear?”) The overlap between street style, art and culture, and the beautiful game loomed large, from the audience to the post-screening panel discussing, well, just that subject.
The event, though, offered a heavy dose of universal goodness to anyone who loves soccer, most obviously in the evening’s main offering. The 49-minute German documentary Stickers Collecting Fever, for one, outlined the history of soccer stickers, a particular kind of madness that sweeps the entire world before major tournaments.
Here are seven cool highlights from Kicking and Screening’s first night, which, like the sands of time, are now mostly gone – but the festival continues, and the programming ramps up! (Wednesday night’s offerings, for instance, include Club Frontera, an intriguing-sounding documentary on the advent and success of Liga MX team Xolos; the full festival lineup is here.)
Soccer photography aplenty
Not just last night, but throughout the festival, you can check out beautiful shots of the global game on your path to the bar, the theater, the restroom…. Soccer is everywhere.
These Panini stickers
With the main film event of the night centering around stickers, naturally, there were plenty of cool freebies for early arrivals. Prism-foil-stamped Olivier Giroud or Gerard Pique, anyone?
These Swiss stickers
In Stickers Collecting Fever, the director, Corinna Hackenbroch, presents this tiny Swiss company, Tschutti Heftli, as something of an upstart alternative to mainstream Panini stickers. Instead of using photos, they commission artists to illustrate players, with some pretty amazing results. Check these out….
This scene: the New York Derby, in one hallway
Ambassadors from both NYCFC and New York Red Bulls set up their wares outside the festival’s screening room, offering ticket discounts and plenty of goodies…. They just had to do so directly across from each other. Don’t worry; peace prevailed.
This intro from Premier League title winner Christian Fuchs
Leicester City left back Christian Fuchs has been pretty darn open about his desire to play in New York City. He even recorded a greeting message for Kicking and Screening. It’s gonna happen, okay everyone? This is just a liiiitle more proof.
The first movie of the evening, Konspiracy 58
Leave it to Scandinavians and their famously wry, dry sense of humor to come up with something like the night’s first short film, Konspiracy 58.
The premise? It’s a mockumentary following a group of truthers who try to prove that the 1958 World Cup final in Gothenburg, Sweden, indeed never happened. The conspiracy theorists grow in influence until they in turn spawn a counter-faction of soccer supporters and anti-conspiracy protests.
How much can we love Sweden? This mockumentary was produced by the actual government broadcasting service, and stars real footballing legends from that match. Even better, when it was originally shown on Swedish television, it appeared without a preceding notice that it was not, in fact, an actual documentary.
Fans of Spinal Tap – and of critiques of the dangers of revisionism — this is well worth tracking down online and spending 10 minutes of your time.
The main event: Stickers Collecting Fever
Sure, the movie delivers on its promise of tracing the history of Panini stickers and their rise to popularity. But if you’re not totally up on the complete history of trading stickers, period, then this 49-minute German film proves enlightening. Who knew, for instance, that trading cards and stickers first got super popular in Germany through packaging for “Liebig’s Meat Extract?”
Also, the movie introduces us to a gem of a human being, the most thorough soccer sticker collector in all of Germany, a diehard Dortmund fan who literally hasn’t opened his blinds in 20 years. Sunlight bleaches paper and ink, you know?
So if that’s all from the first night of Kicking and Screening, who knows how many little wonders the rest of the event holds? If you’re in the New York City area, you have until this Friday night to attend, starting with Club Frontera tonight. Check out the full lineup on the K&S site.
