Rooting for the Home Team
Back in early March, when the NGO Invisible Children posted their video Kony 2012 on YouTube and Facebook, the result was unprecedented in any sort of social networking, and inconceivable within the world of human rights organizations. Within weeks the film had been viewed over 100 million times, making it to date the single most viral video in history. The critical uproar against director Jason Russell and the film came quickly, and with nearly as much creativity and fervor, as the video itself. Within a few days a nineteen-year-old grad student had posted a Tumblr critique of the film, entitled “Visible Children”; his site quickly received over a million visits. In the days to come, a wickedly funny drinking game for Kony 2012 would be posted online as well, lampooning the film’s stereotypes, simplifications, and self-aggrandizement. The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole used Twitter to offer seven pithy comments on the film and what he called the “White Savior Industrial Complex.” My favorite? “I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.”
Not surprisingly, there was also a pushback against the backlash. Both the New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and Human Rights Watch came out in defence of the aims, if not the methods, of Invisible Children and Kony 2012. Those who have for many years worked to lobby powerful nations and their citizens in hopes of aiding (not saving) the less powerful understandably refused to believe that nothing good could come from all this attention and enthusiasm. Here too, however, the collective intelligence of the web, with a certain Ethan Zuckerman as its avatar, had already composed a thoughtful blog that ended with a call to both thought and action: “The Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good?”
Tonight, July 11th, 2012, at the Sarajevo Film Festival, I for one consider these questions (as lawyers like to say) asked and answered. This day—Human Rights Day in Bosnia-Herzegovina—was dedicated to commemorating the Srebrenica genocide, so the films to be screened were picked with utmost care. To the point, tonight’s main feature, Gilles Perez and Gilles Rof’s Les Rebelles du foot, was preceded by a short film by Ines Tanović, A Day on the Drina, a documentary that follows the work of a team of forensic investigators as they dug for human remains in the watershed of an artifical lake. Hardly the sort of movie that generally opens for a film extolling the virtues of a half-dozen sport heroes.
But that is, of course, precisely the film’s point. Eric Cantona, Didier Drogba, Carlos Caszely, Rachid Mekhloufi, Predrag Pašić, and the inimitable Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira were not just any soccer stars. Off the pitch, their lives rival, or surpass, the spectacular achievements they brought us in the beautiful game. Drogba’s decision to take his trophy across the front lines during the Ivory Coast civil war helped to end the conflict. Caszely made a pro-democracy campaign ad with his mother, who had been tortured by the Pinochet regime because her son refused to shake the dictator’s hand. Mekhloufi left his championship team in France to form a squad promoting his native Algeria during the Algerian war for independence. Pašić chose to stay in his hometown Sarajevo, under siege, and lead a soccer club for the city’s children. Sócrates’ club, Corinthians, were radical democrats under the Brasilian dictatorship, and their campaign for free elections helped the country move forward. Cantona is the film’s narrator, cheerleader, and muse. He speaks with pride of his family’s fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War; mainly, though, he does his best to live down his nickname on the pitch, i.e., “The King.”
Rather than monarchs, or even sport heroes, the message of this inspiring film is that what the world needs today are team players. In each case, the heroic action undertaken by these “football rebels” was done in the name of the people, and for the collective good. In some sense, this message is simple, although it is surely never easy. What was wrong with Kony 2012 was clearly not that its filmmakers attempted to inspire youth across the world to oppose a brutal warlord, and to end his reign of terror. Yet when the SRO crowd of 3000+ in Sarajevo stood up, for over twenty minutes, to salute, applaud, and listen to the words of three of the film’s stars—Cantona, Caszely, and their own Predrag Pašić—they were rooting for a vision of action that begins, not from outside, not deus ex machina, orex auro, or ex nihilo. It starts with the home team.
