Football films that score on culture
The Jewish Museum is going into extra time to provide a film festival which aims to give an international perspective to its football exhibition
THOUSANDS OF Jews have reconnected with their inner footballer since the opening of The Jewish Museum London’s groundbreaking Four Four Jew exhibition about Jews and the British game. Now it has added an extra dimension to proceedings with Kicking and Screening — a football film festival hosted by the museum in Camden. The festival brings a number of acclaimed football films from around the world to add a cosmopolitan feel to the exhibition and to give fans something with which to fill those empty evenings during the Champions League winter break.
The museum’s chief executive, Abigail Morris, says the festival is about bringing an international perspective: “Four Four Jew explores the passionate relationship between British Jews and football. This relationship is both unique and universal, describing the particular way Jews have embraced this international game.
“We are delighted to be able to explore this global obsession with a series of international films which explore football in different countries and from dif- ferent angles. These film give us wonderful, funny and thought provoking insights into the so called ‘beautiful game’ — in its many guises all over the world.”
Kicking and Screening is the brainchild of US football fanatic Rachel Markus. Like many American kids she grew up playing football at school and retained a love of the game. So when she came over to work in Britain in 2007 she was delighted to be living within a culture immersed in the game.
Speaking from New York where she now lives, Markus recalls: “If you go to a book store in London you will see 20 great books about the game. I already loved football, or soccer as we call it, but now I got an appreciation not just for the physical aspect of the game but for the global nature of it as well. I loved the fact that you could go to anywhere in the world and have a conversation about David Beckham.”
Markus, who was already watching whatever films she could find about the game, had an idea to organise a football film festival. While she was living in London, she registered the name, Kicking and Screening, got in touch with film-makers and writers and got the idea off the ground. However, the proposed festival was cancelled at the last minute and to add insult to injury Markus lost her job in London as well.
By 2009, she was living in the United States again and the Kicking and Screening idea was re-born following a blind date. The date was with Greg Lalas, a former professional footballer and the brother of Alexei Lalas, one of the all-time greats of American soccer. Markus says: “I told him my sob story about the festival and the next day he said: ‘I’ll do this with you’ and we started taking things forward. In three months starting from nothing, we did a five-night festival , every night in a different venue, and we sold out every screening. We weren’t prepared for the response.”
Since then Kicking and Screening has become a Premier League standard product with festivals in many US cities and worldwide. So when the Jewish Museum decided that its football exhibition needed a visual and international aspect, they approached Markus. She remembers: “They reached out to us and asked if we could put on something for them as part of the exhibition. I loved the name. You could say that they had me at Four Four Jew.”
She adds: “Their spirit is so in line with what we’re about. They weren’t looking for films that had a religious or Jewish focus but rather a celebration of the sport and its impact. Any time you do a festival you have to know something about the audience and given that London is a multi-cultural city I wanted a spectrum of films. I chose some of my favourites and