The Joy of Pick-Up: A Movie Review of “Pelada”

What happens when you spend your life believing in a dream, only to see it slip away? If you’re lucky, you figure out that the dream is still out there, just in a different form.

Former Notre Dame midfielder Luke Boughen won Big East regular season and tournament titles while picking up national honors along the way. Former Duke captain Gwendolyn Oxenham, the youngest Division I athlete in the history of the NCAA at age 16, was voted to the All-ACC team twice and played professionally for a year with Santos FC in Brazil. For both of them, their dreams of a lengthy professional career ended while their relationship was developing.

And then they got an idea.

“Pelada” tells the story of Boughen and Oxenham traveling the world for a year, searching for ‘the other side of the game’ in pickup footy. Through stops and starts necessitated by returns to the United States to raise funds, the former college athletes visited places most of us can’t even imagine, finding games at every turn. More importantly, they found that football is truly a universal language, with strangers being readily accepting and willing to let them play.

Directed by former Duke captain Rebekah Fergusson (who deserves a huge thanks for sending me the screener) and Ryan White (who also acted as producer), along with Boughen and Oxenham, “Pelada” does an excellent job of tracking the growth of Boughen and Oxenham as they explore their love of football outside of the confines of the professional game.

The documentary begins by clearly setting up where the couple are with respect to the game:

“We were has-beens, we used to be great.”
“If the pros didn’t want us, what if we chased a different game?”
“He was the smartest one in the family.” (Luke’s mother, speaking of her son’s decision to forgo law school – notice the use of the past tense)

Over the course of the next 90 minutes, we see the game in its purest form, in a variety of settings. Things start in Brazil, where “pelada” means “naked” (representing the stripped-down version of football), in what ironically turns out to be the most organized form of pickup that Boughen and Oxenham will encounter. With an organized schedule, uniforms and referees, the match in Brazil, contested by ageless old men, is closer to what most Americans would recognize as rec-league soccer. However, we shift quickly to a former Santos teammate of Oxenham’s who now works in a factory and barely has time for the game anymore – a brief reminder that real life often intrudes on our dreams. That is contrasted wonderfully with a young girl nicknamed Ronaldinha Gaucha, who winds up earning her way onto the Brazilian youth team after shining in her local pelada.

Throughout the film, Fergusson (along with producer Ryan White) weaves narration from the couple with footage of pickup matches, often focusing on the one constant – the movement of the ball. For a bare-bones budget that allowed for only two cameras (as far as I could tell), the film manages to capture moments that define the entire experience – the embarrassment of missing a sitter, the joy of pulling off a great move, the spontaneous camaraderie of a goal celebration with strangers.

Although the pickup matches in certain areas (Italy, France, Hungary, England, Austria, Germany, Ghana, Tokyo) seem fairly common, the backstories of the individuals involved as well as some of the details explored make things far more interesting than a cursory glance would suggest. In Italy, for example, we encounter a best-selling author who spends much of his time playing football (when he isn’t working in his pizza shop), while in Germany we meet a former college teammate of Boughen’s who gets upset at losing (announcing in a huff that at one point he was better than the German national team players competing at the European championship).

The film really shines, however, in those situations where pickup football serves as a truly uniting factor, allowing two white Americans – at the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia one of the players tells Luke that he is blending into the landscape because he is so white – to experience the world. In La Paz, Bolivia the couple make their way into the “best game in town”, which just so happens to take place in San Pedro prison. Due to the unique nature of the correctional system, there are no officers inside the facility, so Boughen and Oxenham actually bribe the prisoners (the bribe comes in the form of a purchasing fruitcakes for a highly inflated priace) to let them play. Feeling (perhaps a bit foolishly so) comfortable in the presence of convicted murderers and other violent criminals, the players put their skills on display against individuals who have had nothing but time to perfect their own pickup moves and wind up acquitting themselves fairly well.

The experience in the Bolivian prison stands in contrast to the pickup football in “Villa 31″, a slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Warned by police officers not to go into the neighborhood, the players are determined to find a game after being turned away from the organized field rentals (which were all full) and they wind up playing what many would view as the purest form of football – 2 goals, 1 ball and some players; call your own fouls (if ever) and celebrate your goals as if you just sent home the World Cup-winning PK. After the match is over, the participants give Boughen and Oxenham very specific instructions for making it out of the neighborhood safely, although they seem no more nervous than they had been in the prison.

Moving from South America to Africa, the couple find themselves yet again turning to matches played in some of the most humble conditions, facing off against moonshiners in Mathare, the oldest slum in Kenya, and watching kids play with a ball made from plastic bags in Ghana. Perhaps the most poignant moment comes in Cape Town, South Africa, where workers building Greenpoint Stadium for the 2010 World Cup eat their lunch during tea-time so that they can spend their lunch hour playing pickup football. With that World Cup behind us, we know that most, if not all, of those workers will not have had the opportunity to watch a match in that stadium, which now stands empty as a reminder of FIFA’s uncaring attitude towards its former host countries.

The final entries of the film focus on Jerusalem, Israel and Tehran, Iran, where the greatest potential exists for conflict. To their credit, Fergusson and White stay away from using football as cliched stand-in metaphor of the political environment. In fact, at one point Oxenham even mentions that she has no answers regarding the ability of football to overcome such entrenched obstacles as religious division, noting that it is enough to just play the game. Still, the match in Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs (as both sides define themselves, and each other) is a clear reminder that conflict exists, with the Arab team feeling marginalized when they seem unable to get onto the pitch, and disintegrating into an argument over a disputed goal (off Luke’s foot, no less) when they finally play.

Things are even more tense in Tehran, where Oxenham is technically prohibited from playing football by law. After numerous machinations to find a tour guide willing to lead them to a pickup match, she is eventually allowed to play. Here we get an excellent look at the reality of life under a totalitarian regime, with the players expressing joy at her skill and stating that they were glad they had gotten to play with Americans, but the couple learning the next day that they had been reported to the Iranian government. On their last day in Iran (and the last day of their journey overall), Oxenham gets 15 minutes to play in an all-female pickup match, after which they meet with government officials who spend most of their time discussing football rather than expressing concerns over their activity.

Despite the richness of the film that I’ve described here, there is a lot more to be seen. Although not every moment is as fraught with the tension of the matches in La Paz or Tehran, it is equally important that the directors explored the unbridled excitement of just playing the game. The film does a fantastic job of identifying how the game cuts across divisions and boundaries, without descending into treacly prose portraying football as cure-all. The reality is that after each day’s pelada, the residents of Villa 31 and Mathare still live in a slum, the players in San Pedro are still in prison, the pitch in Jerusalem will still segregate Jews and Arabs.

For Boughen and Oxenham, the tour was about coming to terms with their place in the game. The evolution of the decision that the professional dream is truly over (although it extends a bit for Oxenham after the trip) is a difficult one, but the couple eventually make their peace with the idea that they still have “pelada”.

I’ve included the trailer for the film below, but I would definitely encourage you to go out and buy it. It’s well worth the investment of time and money to see the beautiful game played in its most natural form.

Official Pelada Trailer from Rebekah Fergusson on Vimeo.