Tag: women director
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Football builds community in ‘Las Leonas’ (2022)
Las Leonas is an 8v8 tournament in Rome, where 6 recreational-level womens teams give their all on a small soccer pitch. They are almost all immigrants in Italy, and are mostly from South America. These women in the 30s and 40s play football on their only day off in the week. It gives them community…
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A struggle to play ‘Home Games’ in Kyiv (2018)
The documentary Home Games (Домашні ігри) follows a young woman in 2016 while she struggles to take care of her 6 and 7 year old siblings while pursuing a path to professional football in the Ukraine. Football has been Alina Shilova’s only escape from the poverty of her daily life, and her dream is to…
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When love of football lands you in jail – ‘The Football Aficionado’ (2022)
When a sport is global, modern parts of the world have decided that societal rules of anti-discrimination should apply to all countries. Thus, FIFA has the power to ban nations from the World Cup if their federations allow homophobic or racist chants in stadiums or preclude women from attending games. While FIFA has this power,…
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‘#SeAcabó’ (2024) is a diary of champions
Whether you remember this Netflix documentary as #SeAcabó: Diario de las campeonas or as the English title It’s All Over: The kiss that changed Spanish football, you should remember one thing. These women rose as one above president Luis Rubiales of the Spanish Federation and his underlings. And if you want to see how the…
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‘Greener Grass’ (2019) a lauded absurdist nightmare
I normally don’t research a film before watching it. But I did, and I found an amazing number of reviews praising the 2019 feature film Greener Grass as gloriously twisted, absurdist, surreal, demented, satirical, hilariously deadpan, weird, hysterical and a surprise hit at Sundance.
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Review: ‘An Invisible Victim – The Eliza Samudio Case’ (2024)
Categorized as a True Crime film, the Brazilian documentary A Vítima Invisível: O Caso Eliza Samúdio is really more of a tragedy. A story like this makes me wonder if victims will ever receive justice. Or will celebrities always be able to get away with their crimes, even murder?
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A happy ‘Christmas in Notting Hill’ (2023)
Last Christmas, I was disappointed that I saw half of Christmas in Notting Hill on the Hallmark Channel but could never manage to find it in a schedule so that I could watch the rest of it. And then it disappeared for a whole year, until it showed up recently on Netflix. I’ll never understand…
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‘Untold: Hope Solo vs US Soccer’ (2024) or Hope Solo vs Herself?
In many ways, Hope Solo is a duplicate of the Tonya Harding story. Both athletes were products of the non-conformist Pacific Northwest, had a non-nurturing home life, were fatherless, and struggled economically. Both were determined not to be defined by their circumstances, but to rise above them and become champions. Of course, the reason you…
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A captivating tale of a youth tournament in ‘Kids Cup’ (‘Bortebane’ 2021)
The documentary Kids Cup (original title is Bortebane) follows 5 young footballers, ages 13-14, as they prepare for, compete, win, and lose in a huge international youth tournament known as the Norway Cup. If you’ve ever played in or taken your child to a travel tournament, as we call it in the USA, you and…
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![[Review] ‘The Playbook: A Coach’s Rules for Life’ (2020)](https://soccermoviemom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/the-playbook-2020-thumbnail.jpg)
[Review] ‘The Playbook: A Coach’s Rules for Life’ (2020)
Click on my #Coaching tag, and you’ll see 24 documentary films and series that give insight on soccer coaches at all different levels. The stories range from youth to high school to Liverpool, Leeds, ManU, Barcelona, and Argentina. While I found something to learn in all these films, I highly recommend watching the Netflix series…
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‘Onye Egwu’ (2023) is a Nollywood mess
Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, churns out content in a matter of weeks. Onye Egwu is a film from Uche Jombo studios, and while the production is of fair quality, the story is a mess. There are too many characters with unrelated stories, and the filmmakers tie together the 2 main themes with very thin…
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Review: ‘Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team’ (2023)
Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team is a 4 episode series produced by Netflix. It follows several players as they agonize about making the USWNT roster for WWC 2023. Only 23 women can be selected. And after they’ve made the team, as any USSoccer fan now knows, that team turns in the worst…
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Review: ‘The Ladies with Style’ – ‘Banyana ba Style’ (2022)
The Ladies with Style (Banyana ba Style) was showcased at the BrandStorytelling 2024 event in Utah, which ran in parallel to Sundance. The event honored this film from first-time Director Caroline Brouckaert, because it so effectively melded entertainment, impact, and purpose, and because it was their first selection to get distributed by a major platform…
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Saving each other in ‘The Beautiful Game’ (2024)
I don’t know why The Beautfiul Game has so many reviews in big publications. Is it because actor Bill Nighy is in his prime, or is it because Director Thea Sharrock and actor Micheal Ward are gaining traction? Or is it simply because it is a Netflix film? If you are the Homeless World Cup…
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A perfect 10 – ‘Lionesses: How Football Came Home’ (2022)
When a football documentary is really great, it makes you root for and admire the players even though they are normally your opponents. As a long time USWNT fan since WWC 1999, I thought I would watch this docu and maybe learn a few things about England’s WNT, also known as the Lionesses. Instead, I…
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‘The Other Zoey’ (2023) is cute but is not a soccer movie
I watched this young adult/teen rom-com on Amazon. It’s a very cute story about a nerdy girl named Zoey who inadvertently causes soccer player Zach to suffer a concussion. He gets amnesia and mistakes her for the soccer playing girlfriend he recently started dating, who is also named Zoey.
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‘La Hija de Dios’ shows Maradona as a family man (2023)
I’m not sure why I watched the docuseries La Hija de Dios. I had resolved not to watch any more Diego Maradona films, and I was also put off by the title —The Daughter of God. But the 3-episode series popped up on HBO Max, and it was short, just 138 minutes total. So I…
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‘Equal Playing Field’ from the top down (2021)
Sometimes to get people to pay attention to your message, you have to do something radical. Like have 30 women climb Kilimanjaro and play an official soccer match at an altitude of 18,800 feet.
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The business side of womens football – ‘Angel City’ (2023)
Truth be told, I watched the 3-part Angel City docuseries a couple of weeks ago, but I just couldn’t get myself to write this review. The series shows a lot about Angel City FC that I hadn’t known, and I was glad to learn it. But the coverage of the startup and inaugural year of…
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‘Soccer Shrines’ (2010) – stadiums as places of fan worship
Soccer Shrines is a series that covers fans and their football stadiums across 3 continents, selecting the better-known clubs in a country. Produced for the Canadian market in 2010, it’s a sort of travelogue. I say “sort of”, because you don’t really see much of the country that is visited, so you aren’t inspired to…
