Garlic and Watermelons + The Easton Cowboys
On the 25th October Garlic and Watermelons will be screened at the Pearce Institute, highlighting one of the social costs of mega-sporting events.
Also on Saturday 20th October Goal Dreams will be screened at The Peace Institute. (Details below)
Garlic and Watermelons
The lights of the Olympic Stadium loom above the rooftops of a pink and purple village. Below, women are washing clothes, men peeling garlic, and children are playing in the dust. Prokopis Nikolau sits alone on the cement patio of his wooden shack, looking pensive, sullen. He and the others in the settlement, a deeply intertwined circle of family and friends, are Greek Gypsies. They have lived in this village, built with their own hands, for over forty years. But the Olympics are coming to Athens, and the city is one big construction site. The place where Prokopis Nikolau and his family have lived for generations is now at the epicenter of the chaos. Their settlement is adjacent to the Main Olympic Complex, and they have been informed that their homes will be demolished in order to make room for a parking lot.
Prokopis is a 36-year-old father with two precocious young sons and a new baby daughter. To support his family, he sells seasonal produce from the back of his red pickup truck: garlic in the spring, watermelons in the summer, potatoes in the fall, and holly around Christmas. He also collects and sells scrap metal. When his family is evicted from the settlement where they had lived for generations, his job becomes more difficult. Now, he has to come up with money for rent, water, and electricity every month. He is promised a subsidy from the local municipality, but the money proves elusive. Prokopis takes on a new role: as the unofficial representative of the group of forty families who were displaced to make room for the parking lot. He meets with human rights activists, shares his story with the international media that have descended on Athens in the months leading up to the Olympics, and brings his struggle to the mayor's doorstep and finally to the courts.
The film Garlic and Watermelon chronicles the lives of Prokopis and his extended family in the year leading up to the Olympic Games. Their struggle to find a new home, to extract the subsidies that they were promised from the local municipality, and to rebuild their lives represents a humble battle against racism and poverty. But their story is bittersweet. While Prokopis deals with unresponsive bureaucrats, family disputes, and several evictions, his wife has a beautiful new baby girl, his sons learn to read and write, and the entire family savors a traditional Easter feast.
Goal Dreams
Also on Saturday 20th October Goal Dreams will be screened at The Peace Institute.
In the midst of the relentless daily hardship that they endure, a Palestinian sports commentator says of his own people that they will drop everything they are doing to watch their beloved national soccer team play. He describes the Palestinian national team's bid to qualify for the World Cup in 2006 as "one of our most beautiful dreams." The commentator's words set the tone for the documentary film "Goal Dreams" (directed by Maya Sanbar and Jeffrey Saunders). "Goal Dreams" charts the emotional path of the Palestine national team as its players gather from all over the world to wear the jersey that says "Palestine" and to represent their people on the international stage.
"Goal Dreams" is one of several documentaries produced in recent years that illuminate the effects of conflict and occupation on the lives of Palestinians. Like "Ford Transit" (directed by Hany Abu Asad) and "The Color of Olives" (directed by Carolina Rivas), "Goal Dreams" forgoes traditional documentary features such as timelines, maps and narration of historical facts in favor of showing the human story of Palestine. Though the afore-mentioned films benefited from tighter editing and well-paced scenes, "Goal Dreams" is worth watching because of the unique story it tells.
The film opens with a soccer team that is short several players, practicing in Ismailiya, Egypt, for their qualifying match against Uzbekistan in less than a month. The team's Austrian coach, Alfred Riedl, is faced with more than the average load of challenges. "We are unique in the world," he laments, describing a team made up of nationals of different countries, many of whom don't even share a common language. The restrictions on the movement of players traveling from Palestine delay the team's practice for days on end. "We don't even have a country! We have to practice here [Ismailiya]...we don't know what we are, who we are."
The coach's mood vacillates between passionate determination to make a strong showing at the qualifying match and exasperation at the obstacles his players encounter - individually and as a team - on the road to the World Cup. One of the memorable scenes of the film is a practice that has coach Riedl fuming in nearly indecipherable English, as his players look back and forth between him and the English and Spanish translators, trying to understand the instructions for a drill they have clearly failed to execute. Reflecting on the event later, the players share a laugh about the inferior quality of the translation.
The Palestinian national team seems like a microcosm of the global Palestinian community, a people living in exile or under occupation. While the team is made up of players of Palestinian heritage, they hail from many nations including Chile, Sweden, the United States, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt. All the Palestinian players, even those who are several generations removed from the homeland, are driven by a desire to play for Palestine's team and have some awareness of the political significance of their efforts. Murad, the Palestinian-American, describes this awareness as wanting to play for a team with "Palestine" written on his jersey.
Through each of the main characters in the film, we learn about a set of struggles that Palestinians encounter. The American and Chilean-born players represent the experiences of diaspora Palestinians and the difficulties they face in remaining connected to the larger community in spite of distance and language barriers. The player from Lebanon introduces the audience to the reality of life in Palestinian refugee camps, with the scarcity of work and opportunities as well as the daily struggle for survival. The goalkeeper, who arrives almost a week late from Gaza after several failed attempts to cross the border into Egypt and great hardship along the way, gives us a glimpse into the danger, violence, and total uncertainty that control the lives of millions of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.
As each of the team members negotiates his own thorny path to Ismailiya, we watch as the Palestinian players work to unite as a team, mirroring the challenge that the global Palestinian community faces as it struggles to maintain the bonds that have frayed over years of dispossession. "Goal Dreams" is a testament to the power of the Palestinian dream and to the Palestinian people's ability to cling to hope even in the darkest moments of their history.
The Easton Cowboys
On their return from their football tour of Palestine, The Easton Cowboys witnessed the everyday struggle to survive and resist the Israeli occupation. The Easton Cowboys are an amateur sports and social club from Bristol with an ethos of social justice, inclusion and internationalism. And on the 20th October they are coming up to Glasgow to play a 5-a-side tournament against The Universal Team, Afro Scots, and The Unity Team. As part of their commitment to the Palestinian struggle for peace and justice, the Easton Cowboys want to encourage other groups to organise similar sporting tours and maybe win more games than the Cowboys did. Together with the film, the Easton Cowboys will be showing some of their slides from the trip and answering any questions.