Run Into It

Until recently, sports documentaries tend to fall into two categories: Hoop Dreams and everything else. Where Steve James’ 1994 film, equally intimate and epic, is renowned and frequently cited as a model of complex and effective documentary filmmaking, most sports docs are content to tell familiar stories of rises and falls and redemptions, with earnest talking heads and footage borrowed from TV or NFL Films. The dramatic exceptions of Barbara Kopple’s Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993) and Spike Lee’s Jim Brown: All American (2002) only make the rule seem more emphatic: sports documentaries are predictable, made for TV and beyond that, for very particular demos.

No more. As illustrated by the program in this year’s Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, sports documentaries have arrived—as an innovative, intriguing, and groundbreaking genre. On Saturday, 24 April, the program kicks off with a panel discussion among several 30 for 30 filmmakers, along with ESPN Films executive producer Connor Schell. The topic is “the future of sports filmmaking at ESPN Films,” but the broader context is already established. Surely jumpstarted by ESPN, who produced Black Magic, Dan Klores’ 2008 film on basketball and the U.S. civil rights movement, sports documentaries have found continued support in the network’s much admired 30 for 30 series (now in its second year). Sports documentaries now constitute a vibrant and diverse art form. 

The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival includes a number of titles generating buzz, like the 30 for 30 productions, The Birth of Big Air, Straight Outta L.A., and The Two Escobars. Two other films in the program help to expand the genre’s definition, Sebastian Copeland’s Into The Cold and Mika Ronkainen’s Freetime Machos. Both exceptional, these films couldn’t be more different from each other in style or subject matter (a noble Arctic expedition and a rugby team in Oulu, Finland), but both offer insights into the ways athletes structure their lives, commit to goals, and understand themselves, as individuals and members of groups. 

Into The Cold traces a journey, by Copeland and Keith Heger, repeating Robert Peary’s 1909 trek to the North Pole, more than 400 miles on foot. As they are following, Copeland says, “in the steps of the supermen who charted the maps of our world, with their bravery, instinct and natural connection with the land,” the two not only test themselves, but also mean to “raise awareness” of the melting Arctic due to global warming. Copeland imagines this will be a last opportunity for this precise mission: “By 2013,” he says, “The ice will be all but gone.” 

Such concern shapes the film, which is part document of the arduous trip and part poetic rumination on the extraordinary beauties of the landscape. It’s comprised of Copeland’s own footage, as he and Heger first train in wildly wintry Minnesota (“Training for the Pole is a daunting task,” he observes, a goal with a “70% failure rate,” posing a “life and death challenge for even the fittest athletes”) and then head out to the sea ice, which they traverse for just over a month. The preparation footage includes details of packing—clothing, gear (“the iPod, of course”), and food (“Calculating each meal’s caloric intake and exacting it against amount we’ll be pulling”)—as well as a dinner with Inuit elders the night before they leave. The locals share “with us the way that climate change is affecting their lives,” namely, the poverty that is depressing their far-flung communities. 

The actual trek is stunning, in ways expected and not. The bright white ice and he blue skies, he says, encourage individual contemplation, questions like “‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ In the white stark vastness of the great north answers come easier because there are fewer places to hide.”  At times Copeland repeats himself while narrating (“All this in the silent and lonely universe, punctuated only by the sound of heavy breathing, your own”), a tic that seems reasonable, even thematic given the repetitiveness of the uneven terrain, the daily sledge-dragging, the nightly freezing in the tent, the walking, walking, walking into distant horizons. When, one day, they come upon creaking and shifting ice, loud and incessant and not a little alarming, Copeland says, “It’s just unbelievable: this pressure ridge is being formed just as we speak… Millions and millions of tons of ice just being moved and crumbled.” And then, the lesson: “Such is the power of nature. Our focus as a people must be on harnessing that into sustainable energy.”

At some point it stops mattering what he says, as the footage reveals a jumble of majesty and harshness. Reaching the North Pole is incredible—photos of their weary, elated faces attest—but in the end, Copeland admits, his expedition and the efforts of other activists are “not about protecting the planet,” which will go on. “This is about protecting ourselves, from ourselves.” 

Freetime Machos

Less overtly philosophical, Freetime Machos is nonetheless a remarkably moving and terrifically smart evocation of how men find themselves. The movie begins with an ode, of sorts, to what seems a regional masculinity. “In northern Finland, men would rather be stabbed in the back than complain about women trouble or say hello to an unknown neighbor.” The camera shows faces—rugged, stoic, grim men’s faces, huddled towards each other as if in a scrum. ” In the bedroom, you sleep or copulate, not wank or have sex,” the intro continues. “You don’t linger in the toilet and you empty your plate. You make the best of your job whatever it is. Men did not cry. They weren’t ashamed, even though they failed in all of these.” Grrr.

And then you learn that these men, so fiercely self-defining in a town close to the Arctic circle, are not in fact not so fixed. If they don’t voice their fears or their worries, they do share them, among other men, their team members. Many of the men here work for Nokia, a soul-killing corporation that summarily dismisses designers whose expertise becomes obsolete. And many of them use their play on the field to work through concerns in other parts of their lives—children, money, girlfriends, and sex. Their team has a pathetic record (last year they finished fifth out of the six clubs in their division), but they hope to improve their ranking at least to the point they can stay in the division.

From the opening titles sequence that follows best mates Matti Keränen and Mikko Koljonen over blocks and blocks of sidewalks to the practice field, the film makes clear that rugby provides both it and the team members with structure. During practices, post-game sauna sessions, and on the bus en route to and from matches, the men perform and expose themselves, sometimes literally.

When Matti hurts his finger during one practice, his fellows tease him about this “very manly rugby injury” (“It means you’re not even playing properly!”). They gossip about a friend’s single status (he’s only had one girlfriend, they joke, for two weeks in high school). Their coach Roger Holden insists they find more cunning ways to win—or at least not embarrass themselves. “There’s space,” he points out after yet another loss. “Run into it.” Repeated interludes show Jarmo Stoor, one of Nokia’s fed-up employees, pushing his car up a snowy hill, like Sisyphus. His fourth book, in progress, runs through his head as he leans into the cold car trunk:

Why is it that women’s rights are positive feminism and men’s rights are horrendous male chauvinism? A man is supposed to be both soft and hard, an attentive listener and a macho man. A gentle family man and a crazy lover.

Inside the car, driving, his face in tight close-up, Jarmo ponders what it means to be an äijä, a true man. “A bohemian philosopher and a hunk,” he muses, “A responsible provider and an impulsive adventurer. A well-off gentleman and a penniless poet.” Indeed, the task seems impossible. His narration helps to clarify the film’s mediation on the seemingly incompatible demands made by machismo and intimacy, the closeness of spirit and self-knowledge on a team, alongside the “tough” personae they present to one another. Sequences of the matches help to make this contradiction clear: physical contact and emotional turmoil, career success and effective playtime—all these positions must be negotiated daily, each act simultaneously self-expression and self-construction.

This is, in essence, what sports can do. Even if sports don’t necessarily produce gender, class or sexuality (an anxious-making question that comes up repeatedly in Freetime Machos), they do help individuals and communities to sort through the nuances of identity. And for that, at least, sports matter. As do the films that seek to understand them.