Kickstart: Examining African football players in Beijing
by Jerry Chan, That's Beijing magazine, July 2005
The swelling global interest in all things Beijing isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it just depends on who (or what) is behind the hype. The city’s growing international community, for instance, has been attracting a lot of attention lately, and for foreigners bedding down in China getting to the root of the hype boils down to the age-old question: “What are you doing here?”
For the athletes featured in the documentary film African Boots in Beijing the answer is, quite simply, football – but the stories revealed within the film are anything but simple. “We were lucky to have the chance to make a film about a group of compelling characters, which is the key to any good documentary,” explains Luke Mines, a filmmaker and native Californian who teamed up last year with Jeremy Goldkorn, a South African of Jewish/English descent, to co-produce the 48-minute film. “I had wanted to collaborate with Luke ever since I saw his documentary about traveling through South Africa,” says Goldkorn. “I found it to be an incredibly informative and accurate depiction [of my homeland].”
Entirely self-funded and produced on a budget of only RMB 800, African Boots follows the players of Africa United, a team composed primarily of African players (see Cover Feature, pXX), as they compete in a local amateur league. It paints compelling portraits of the players’ lifestyles and the challenges they face living in China. “There are several major personalities in the film including Sam Ahadu, an Ethiopian who escaped his country as a refugee and ended up moving to Beijing with his American wife eight years ago,” explains Goldkorn. “He really is quite relaxed in front of the camera and he’s got the gift of gab,” adds Mines with a laugh.
Other featured personalities include Jose Tumba, a native Congolese who has lived in Beijing since 1985 and is married to a Chinese national (“He really has seen a lot of changes happen, and has experienced the pressures of being in an interracial relationship,” adds Goldkorn), and Kagashani Projestus, the fired-up Tanzanian coach and founder of the team.
Through personal interviews and game footage, the film shows how a group of people who at first glance seem completely alien and incongruous to their environment has actually come to thrive in Beijing. Says Goldkorn: “I hope [at the very least] our film will help people understand that China is an increasingly cosmopolitan place … we want people to walk away with the idea that Africans are a part of the globalization of the world economy and not just victims of civil war and disease.”
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The original article on That's Beijing web site.
