Israel’s Arab-Jewish conflict played out on a soccer field
Any soccer fanatic gearing up for the World Cup will tell you that national pride is on the line with every game. When that pride is caught up in geopolitics, keeping score can get even more complicated. The documentary “After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United” looks at Bnei Sakhnin, a soccer team from an Arab city in Israel that won that country’s national cup in 2004.
National identity is a fraught issue for the country’s Arab Israelis, who often feel like outsiders in their country. The inhabitants of the city of Sakhnin are no exception. When their team beat the rest of the Israeli teams to win the Israeli Cup, the fans were overjoyed, and the whole country saw how well a team made up of Arab Israeli, Jewish and foreign players could work together.
Producer Michael Cohen, a soccer fanatic from England, saw even more. “To me, this team and the fact that they won this cup, and that the country has kind of been turned on its head, was an amazing way to show the real Israel.”
Cohen, whose mother is Israeli, spent a lot of time in her homeland over the years. “I love the country and have always been fascinated with this untold story of the Israeli Arabs,” he says by phone from New York, where he now lives. “As a Jew from London, you have an idealized version of Israel in your head, and, certainly, I was never made aware of this population of over a million Arabs outside of the West Bank and Gaza that lived within Israeli society.”
He and fellow producer Roger Bennett sought out Christopher Browne, who had filmed another unlikely sports movie, the bowling documentary “The League of Ordinary Gentlemen,” to direct the project. Notes Browne, also by phone from New York, “I’m not Jewish or Arab; I think they wanted someone who was a little bit outside the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” He found the only downside to his outsider status was the language barrier. “It takes that much longer to get people to let their guard down,” since he was working through translators.
For the documentary, opening in Los Angeles on Friday, “we wanted to develop characters and tell a story, rather than just relying on talking heads and game footage,” Browne says, so that meant “waiting for something interesting to happen to get a little bit of a narrative.”
The camera crew followed the team through their next season, when they were fighting to maintain their hard-won standing in the Premier League (akin to baseball’s major leagues), rather than being sent back to the minors. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the joyful days and weeks immediately after the win didn’t last, and the team was buffeted by conflicts from inside and out.
“The season that we followed was arguably a lot more interesting than the one leading up to them winning the cup,” Cohen says. “All the attention was focused on them, and it became much more of an international story. The challenge was to break through and get people talking about the real issues, which is always very difficult in Israel.”
The filmmakers present family members, rabid fans, the local press, teammates, and the Arab owner and Jewish coach as the story unfolds both on and off the field. But it is Sakhnin’s handsome, charismatic team captain, Abbas Suan, who is the film’s undeniable star. “He’s Lawrence of Arabia,” Cohen concurs. Suan’s graceful handling of his difficult position, complete with taunts and slurs from opposing teams’ fans, brings to mind the great Jackie Robinson.
(A professed “tattooed lunatic Arsenal fan,” Cohen shrugs off the uglier incidents between fans in the film as strictly bush league compared with the behavior he sees back in England.)
Suan’s soccer skills land him on the national team during Sakhnin’s regular season. In a 2006 World Cup qualifying match against Ireland, he scores a goal that keeps the team from being eliminated and instantly becomes a national hero. Facing the cameras after the game, he humbly says, “I dedicate this goal to all the people of Israel — Jews and Arabs. This is a gift for all.”
“We couldn’t have scripted a character like that; he was just a dream.” Cohen declares. “The guy carried that town on his shoulders, in every way.”
