Each year of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a filmmaker curates a themed series. This year, Steve James, Academy Award-winning director of Hoop Dreams, is curating "This Sporting Life," a series of both sports-related documentary and feature films from the past five decades.
"The ratios of films being made about sports and the films we were screening about sports-there was sort of a disconnect there," said Sadie Tillery, Full Frame's director of programming. "We saw this as an opportunity to look at the form of the sports film and really think about the way that the sports documentary has influenced [it]."
The series features an impressive and diverse group of films. The 2006 Spanish documentary Maletilla follows professional children bullfighters. Fallen Champ documents Mike Tyson's career after 1993 rape accusations. On the fictional side, 1977's Slap Shot stars Paul Newman as an aging player/coach of a minor league hockey team and 1963's This Sporting Life follows Richard Harris as a coal-miner-turned-rugby-star. Also being shown are documentaries about Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden, soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane and Chinese child-athletes pushed to the limit for the 2008 Beijing Oympics.
As for James, the trip to Durham will be a familiar one. He has had three films shown at the festival in the past, including last year's At the Death House Door, which won the Inspiration Award.
"Hoop Dreams is perhaps the most well known [and] best-appreciated sports documentary-maybe sports film-of all time," Tillery said. "We are really proud of the way he interpreted the sports theme and the films he selected."
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