DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Over that World Cup hangover yet? Or perhaps you just want to erase the memory of some of the less appealing aspects of the tournament: namely, grown men — and fabulously rich and famous ones, at that — acting like children, taking dives and crying like babies about fouls that a quick review of the footage clearly demonstrates never happened. Not to mention the stubborn refusal of the sport’s ruling body to actually use those tapes to dole out some much needed discipline that might help eliminate all that whining and get them back to actually playing some decent football. If you need a reminder that some people play the sport for the pure joy of it, this documentary travels around the world to watch and interview participants in one of the most universal sporting acts on earth: the pickup soccer game.
The film’s title comes from what the Brazilians call these games; the word in Portuguese translates literally to “naked,” implying that this is the game in its purest, most unadorned form. The filmmakers — led by a pair of former college soccer players who missed the cut to go pro — set out to see and participate in these games wherever they can find them. They end up finding games on grass, dirt, and concrete, played by men, women, and children, some with homemade balls, some with balls practically without any air in them. The film was a big hit at the South by Southwest festival this spring, and D.C. United is sponsoring a special one-night-only benefit screening in D.C. next week — ticket proceeds from the screening will benefit the club’s charitable wing, United for D.C.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Avalon. $15.
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African Diaspora Film Festival
For the fifth year, the African Diaspora Film Festival presents a program of films that show the experience of people of African descent throughout the world, presented in partnership between the festival, the TransAfrica Forum, and National Geographic’s All Roads Film Project. This year’s festival got underway last night, and features ten programs through Sunday evening. Tonight’s trio of films starts with a pair of movies about two griots — African bards and respositories of oral histories — one from Burkina Faso, the other a Nobel Prize winner for Literature from Nigeria. Also on tonight’s bill is a film about the spread of reggae from Jamaica to the rest of the world. Programs tomorrow and Sunday present both documentary and narrative films, covering topics from Cuban and Haitian exiles to the diamond business in the Congo to the politics of African-American activism.
Going on now and continuing through Sunday at National Geographic. Check the schedule for complete details.
