The 16th 11mm International Football Film Festival points towards a more inclusive future for the straight male-dominated sport.
Spend any significant amount of time attending Berlin’s arthouse kinos or indie festivals, and you’ll inevitably start noticing the same familiar faces in the audience. One of the great things about the 11mm International Football Film Festival is that it caters to a crowd of hardcore soccer fans that you’d never normally find hanging out at host venue Babylon in Mitte. This 16th edition kicks off on Mar 21 with Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s Nossa Chape, a deeply moving documentary about the rebirth of Brazilian club Chapecoense, which lost most of its players in a 2016 plane crash. This year there’s a special focus on women in the sport, headlined by a screening on Mar 22 of Football for Better or Worse. This engrossing, timely doc highlights the aggravating disparities between men’s and women’s professional soccer by telling the story of world-class Swedish team FC Rosengård. On Mar 23, sports journalist Max-Jacob Ost leads a free panel discussion exploring whether football culture is still dominated by nostalgic old men. And the thorny issue of queer representation in soccer is pondered in Marcel Gisler’s sensitive drama Mario (Mar 24), which tells the tale of two handsome up-and-coming players embroiled in an intense clandestine romance.
Mar 21-25, Babylon Kino (Mitte). Full programme at 11-mm.de