Photography by Benjamin Carsley
On a muddy football pitch in New York on a Saturday at the end of March, the German filmmaker Christian Petzold threatened murder. “Their goalie is really good,” he said, coaching his team from the sidelines while nursing a green apple flavored vape. “We need to kill him, maybe.”
Petzold was in town promoting his new film, “Miroirs No. 3,” which was playing at the nearby Lincoln Center. The film follows a piano student, played by Petzold regular Paula Beer, as she emerges from the wreckage of a car accident and convalesces in the home of a mysterious, grief-stricken German woman who sees her as a surrogate for the daughter she lost. Also showing at the same cinema was Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s third feature, “Dry Leaf,” which stars Koberidze’s father as Irakli, a man searching for his missing daughter across a series of football stadiums in Georgia. Sponsored by Screen Slate, Cinema Guild and 1-2 Special, the two directors faced off in a friendly match at Riverside Park.
“Miroirs” and “Dry Leaf” feature a malleability of bodies and selfhood, a trademark of both Petzold and Koberidze’s work as they each navigate political tumult and a shift to the far-right in their respective countries. As characters cling to dreams of family and reunification, their identities erode and decay against sun-dappled rural landscapes. Their films also both contain echoes of the cadence of football: its collectivism, its substitutions, its ghosts of glory.
Fittingly, there was a blurring of the boundaries between players before the match, as the filmmakers’ teams gathered on the field. A lucky few who had signed up online to play on a first-come first-serve basis stood on the field wearing maroon and gold jerseys designed by Bráulio Amado and emblazoned with the names of the directors and their films. They were assigned to each team at random. The players were strangers to each other, but as they huddled then dispersed onto the field, each team of seven morphed into its own beating organism, with mandatory substitutes flowing in and out every fifteen minutes.
Dozens of film nerds sat in the bleachers, sipping lukewarm coffee and biting into Dunkin’ Donuts. A hipster kid with vampire teeth popped into his gums ran around the lawn. The referee wore a long coat embroidered with talismans and symbols and seemed lax about keeping score, though the crowd observed each pass and goal with fervor.
Petzold wasn’t playing. His knees were injured from more than two decades in a league with Harun Farocki, his cinematic mentor and collaborator. He coached actively from the sidelines, making substitutions and strategizing. Koberidze began the game coaching with a more laissez-faire attitude, but shed his sports coat in the first half and stormed onto the field, making a few crucial assists and playing with a sense of serious dedication.
A star emerged on Petzold’s team: Rei Buitron, a left back who thwarted his opponents with deft, tricky footwork. Buitron, an Ecuadorian mechanical engineer and documentary filmmaker, started kicking around a ball when he was two years old and could barely walk. “The sport is like a religion in South America,” he said in an interview, “and for some kids it’s the only way forward in life.
Despite Buitron and Petzold’s best efforts, Koberidze’s keeper—good to the point of maybe warranting death—managed to hold his own. He even managed to score himself, launching the ball with a swift kick across the length of the field and into the opposing goal. Koberidze’s team prevailed and won 6-5, a narrow victory that elicited cheers. But there were other kinds of winners: Buitron got his ball signed.
The friendly game between two filmmakers who admired each other’s work from afar was in stark contrast with the tense cinematic match that inspired it: In March 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci faced off after their mentor-mentee relationship had soured. On a field in Parma, Italy, bathed in celluloid silver light, the directors and their teams struggled for the ball, using their bodies to bridge the strange distance that had formed between them.
Pasolini, who exalted football as “the last sacred ritual of our time,” drafted eleven members of his cast and crew on “Salo.” Bertolucci struggled to find willing players from his film crew for “1900,” and opted to recruit two 15-year-old ringers from Parma’s youth team. One of them was Carlo Ancelotti, better known today as one of the game’s most decorated coaches and the manager tasked with leading Brazil back to World Cup glory. In 1975, with his help, Bertolucci’s team won 5-2. Pasolini sulked.
Their battle of egos was heightened by the 1970s culture of filmmaking that designated the auteur as the star. (Months after their match, Pasolini was found dead and abandoned on a football pitch near Rome, a tragedy that sparked further intrigue and interest in his work.) In the decades since, the importance of the auteur has diminished, as filmmakers have embraced a more collectivist approach. That same idea—of losing oneself in a crowd or in a crew—was what contributed to Petzold’s love of the sport.
“You are losing your individuality,” he said in an interview with Screen Slate.” You are part of language. You know where to pass the ball. This feeling is very similar to that of the best moments when you are making movies.”
Petzold and Koberidze feigned playful aggression in the days leading up to the match. Germans “have a long dictatorship of coaching,” Petzold joked in an Instagram Reel. As the manager, he added, “This could be a fantastic Saturday morning for me, and I’m not sure if this could be a very fantastic morning for the players.” But after the game, the directors spoke with no self-conceit, only admiration.
“If you once played football with or against someone,” Koberidze said in an interview with Golden Goal, “the next time you greet each other differently.”
After the match, Koberidze and Petzold draped their arms around each other’s shoulders. Fifty years prior, Pasolini and Bertolucci made the same gesture, patching up their fraught relationship. In that sense, not much had changed between the director-led game in New York and its previous iteration in Parma.
In Alexandre Koberidze’s sophomore film, “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?” a little dog named Vardy slumps behind a theater in Kutaisi, Georgia, to watch football while his human counterparts sit cross-legged in plastic chairs. They are all nearly immobile. When their team scores, a boy with ice cream smeared across his mouth reflexively throws his arms into the sky. The adults in their chairs do the same thing. They can’t help themselves. Together, they jerk their arms and legs in a cross-cultural, primordial sign of triumph.
The locals have long forgotten why they continue to gather behind the same theater for each game. “But a tradition is a tradition,” the narrator says.