I’ll admit it, I’m not a fan of cricket. My own experience with the sport comprises of a couple of hours spent watching it on a tiny old fashioned TV set in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in 2006. There, a famous film director of Bollywood masala films (you know, action-y and extra violent, with girls as side dishes) and his family were hosting me for the annual Patang kite festival and he attempted to explain the game to me. I sat there, glossy eyed from a complete lack of grasp of “wickets, doosra and googly” drinking a fragrant cup of chai that I remember with much more intensity than the game itself.
Fast forward nearly fifteen years and I found my love for cricket within an Italian filmmaker’s documentary that has little to do with the game and much more about humanity’s place within it. Well, the film is called ‘This Is Not Cricket’ after all, and the filmmaker is a wonderfully fresh voice in documentary, Jacopo de Bertoldi. Someone with whom every conversation turns into an explanation of life.
But back to the film for a moment. A team, the Piazza Vittorio Cricket Team comprising of Bengali, Indian, Pakistani and Italian players meet up in the fields surrounding Rome as young teenagers. They are mentored by two coaches who instill in them a sense of discipline, plus nurture the dreams of becoming professionals one day and in the process, help them form into young adults. But as happens often in life, at one point the dream ends, the team breaks up, disassembles with players going their way, a few others returning home, and more still becoming fundamentally religious. It’s a worldly tale that could have been taking place in London, or New Delhi, it just happens to take place in my own backyard in Italy.
I followed the film since it crowdfunded on the now gone UAE-based platform Aflamnah. I wrote about ‘This Is Not Cricket’ for the HuffPost while it was still in development, in early 2015 and loved the premise, plus the way the filmmaker himself steered clear of the usual cliches about migration and acceptance. Let me explain what I mean.
‘This Is Not Cricket’ is firstly the story of two young men, Fernando born in Italy and Shince originally from India, who become lifelong friends in Rome through their love of cricket. But the film is more than a sport doc about a multi-cultural cricket team in Italy. In de Bertoldi’s able hands, cricket becomes a means to tell a story of not belonging, of growing up in a globalized world where we aren’t quite sure where home is. And how the dreams that helped us to grow up, can become breaks almost, stopping us from truly finding our place within society.
Although I am not a fan of cricket itself, I found the film honest and very actual, a sort of antidote to the documentaries of Gianfranco Rosi and Michael Moore. While Rosi colors the narrative with the story he always had in mind and almost manipulates his subjects into it, Moore puts himself front and center as a leading character in his films. Unlike them, de Bertoldi stays out of the way, becoming an invisible storyteller, a fly on the wall if you will for an important contemporary tale of displacement. In the vein of great documentarians before him, he followed the protagonists for nearly ten years, from teenagers to young adults, and the result is a film that becomes a roadmap for growing up, in a world where few of us ever feel like we belong.
After having world premiered at the 2019 Rome Film Festival, in the precious Alice nella Città (Alice in the city) sidebar, the film was slated to enjoy a theatrical run. But alas, the Covid-19 emergency measures hit and that idea, along with being able to enjoy the film on a big screen with great surround sound as it was meant to be viewed, vanished. Yet the online platform ZaLab, the passion project of Italian filmmaker Andrea Segre, understood the value of this film, now more than ever, and will begin streaming it on May 7th. Check out ZaLab here and join them. From the US you may need a VPN. But you didn’t hear that here… The film is available with English subtitles as well.
I caught up with de Bertoldi via email to interview him about ‘This Is Not Cricket’. I thought I would edit his answers and sprinkle them among the piece but found his voice as honest, kind and non-judgmental as his film is. Therein lies his greatest talent, the ability to allow his leading men to tell their story, without adding his voice into their narrative. The documentary feels like a fiction film but not because he made it so, rather because he didn’t. He allowed the personalities he had in front of him to shine through, without letting his ego speak out. It’s a rare quality to find in a filmmaker and one that makes editing his answers nonsensical.
Jacopo de Bertoldi needs to speak to you, in full, to show his audience the way forward, both in his film and in life.
How did you decide this was the story you wanted to tell?
Jacopo de Bertoldi: I’d been thinking for a while that I wanted to do a film on adolescence and when I met the protagonists of this story, their circle of friends, witnessed the relationships formed within the team, between them but also with their coaches, I simply fell in love. There was a singular atmosphere full of joy and a lightheartedness, I think largely due to the presence of the two coaches — extraordinary persons. It was after that I understood that within that group there was also a complexity of themes that could tell the story of our present.
How many years did you spend with the guys, Fernando e Shince, following them around and how did you decide when you would film them?
JdB: When I first met Fernando and Shince, they were about 16 and I followed their stories for almost ten years. There was a moment when I understood that talking about adolescence also meant addressing the end of it and the entry into adulthood. So, after my initial phase of filming, we stayed in contact and I asked them both to keep me informed on what they were up to, so I could be present during any important moment in their lives. Those often coincided with the story of the cricket team and their efforts to put it back together, but they also relate to periods of their growth, the important stages of their personal development.
What were some of the biggest challenges for you and what did you discover easier while filming?
JdB: Definitely the most difficult aspect had to be securing producers. Throughout the years, there were several different ones coming in and out and with this uncertainty I had to shoot some segments alone and with few means. At the end, Francesco Virga of Mir Cinematografica came along and helped me finish the film. In all these years, a relationship built on trust and friendship has developed between the two protagonists and me. This allowed me to break down those walls that certainly were there at the beginning, between the camera and the more intimate and natural expressions of the two. Maybe the strongpoint of this film is that the spectator doesn’t have to deal with two young men who in some way are showing off, rather what I mean, there is a kind of authenticity in their communicating, which paradoxically can also make the viewer feel like this was a “mise-en-scène” — as if we were working with actors and a script.
Jacopo de Bertoldi, right, with his protagonists at their premiere in Rome
How did you then decide what to keep into the film and the story you wanted to tell through your footage?
JdB: By the time we sat down to edit the film, we’d accumulated hundreds of hours of filming. It wasn’t easy to make choices. But I’d already decided by then that I wanted to give this documentary the shape of a fiction film and the amount of material I’d shot allowed for that. From this perspective, the choice of scenes was natural, almost automatic, in some ways driven by form. Of course there are several scenes I personally love but that couldn’t fit into the film. But it was a matter of keeping together this form with the story. There are moments that signaled the important stages of growth for these two boys and those help carry out the main themes of the film which are the search for identity, friendship and the pursuit of personal affirmation in a difficult world.
What would you want your audience to take away from your film?
JdB: I hope that this little story of the ordinary everyday can teach, to those who still have doubts, that the difference in skin color is a matter of simple genetics. Fernando and Shince are like two brothers with the only difference that one was born in Italy and the other in India. I hope this comes across loud and clear. This globalized world — which scares us because it broadens the space in which we live but shortens the time — should be seen as a chance for enhancement. Even Fernando points to that, in one of the final scenes while comforting Shince whom having come back to Italy after several months spent in India, feels like a stranger in Rome the city where he grew up and studied, just as he felt foreign in India too.
And what has been the impact of the current crisis around the world on both how the film is viewed, platform vs. big screen etc., but also how the story becomes more or less relevant?
JdB: The film was scheduled to come out in cinemas on May 7th. Obviously this won’t happen and since there are uncertain future plans regarding theaters, we decided to release it in VOD on ZaLab, which is a platform dedicated to “cinema of the real”. ZaLab has an archive of beautiful films by both Italian and world filmmakers. I’m sure those who will decide to subscribe to the site will be pleasantly surprised. To answer your second question, I think this film which tells the story of a friendship, in this moment when we can’t easily spend time with our friends in person, could somehow be comforting.
Is there a sub-story that didn’t make it into the film that you wish you could have kept in there?
JdB: Yes, the theme of religion. The team to which Shince and Fernando belonged was a multiethnic one. Within it there were Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus. Shince himself comes from a Knanaya family, an endogamous Chrisitan group from Kerala, India. Religion itself played a role at times very prominent in the story of team. But there really wasn’t space to address another sub-story in the film. I would have liked to have given more space to some narrative threads that are barely hinted at in the film, but would have ended up making an endless film.