The Making of Pelada 

There have been few times in my life I have been so impressed.  The feelings captured by the soccer movie pelada, and the amazing message of the movie -- that soccer unites, that kicking a soccer ball around is loved world wide, and that soccer crosses all economic and social barriers ... well, this is something to rejoice and take notice of. I asked Gwendolyn Oxenham to write up her story for SoccerNation and here it is.  She has just returned from her honeymoon and she and her husband have been busy attending premiers of their movie -- but Gwendolyn took some time out to share her experience with all of us!

Gwendolyn Oxenham says "After fifteen years, my soccer career ended.  I got a job as a deckhand on a fifteen million dollar private yacht.  I Windexed toilets, de-fingerprinted glass, turned down beds, and placed chocolates on pillows.  One day we were anchored far out in Ascension Bay, close to an island that serves as an outpost for the Mexican army.  As Alfredo skinned grouper on the back of the yacht, he told us about the remote, buggy location: “That’s where the bad soldiers get sent.”  From our boat, we could see them sitting on the dock, machine guns strapped across their chests, machetes in hand.  But right behind them, I could also see a makeshift soccer field, goalposts made out of sticks in the sand.  Alfredo eyed me staring at the field.  He warned, “If I were you, I would not do it.”

After weeks without ball or field, all I wanted was to play.  I dinghied over to the uniformed men and made kicking gestures until my intentions were clear.  A half-hour later, in monsoon-like rain, I played in sand burrs and mine holes and megged soldiers.  I shared goal-celebrations, drank beer, ate ceviche and took Fun-shot photos where I am lodged between the Mexican army and their guns.   

As I scrubbed toilets all the next day, I kept thinking about that pickup game, about all pickup games.  Everywhere, all over the world, people play in impromptu, for-the-hell-of-it games.  What if you went from place to place, looking for these games, using them to meet people, to see what the world looks like when you wander down side streets?  It was a whim, the small kind in the back of your head that hurts you already because you know you’ll never do it.  But three years later I was still thinking about it. 

By then, I’d finished grad school in creative writing at Notre Dame and met Luke, my boyfriend.  Like me, he’s a has-been soccer player—good in college, not good enough to play afterward.  He was a center-midfielder for Notre Dame who scored big goals in big games; I was the youngest Division I athlete in the history of the NCAA, a starter and leading goal scorer for Duke at sixteen-years-old. By twenty-two, our careers were over. We set up a new life in Asheville, North Carolina:  he worked with billboards and I lived on a writing grant.  On an alumni weekend, we went back to Duke.  I met up with Rebekah, a freshman on the team when I was a senior.  Like me, she’d done Documentary Studies in college, so we spent a late night in the library figuring out how we could make a film about the game neither one of us was ready to be done with.  “Pick up” and “around the world” were sketched frantically onto a legal pad.  Then it was two weeks of “are you serious? I’m serious…let’s actually do it.”  The first grant we applied to they told us not to mention the around-the-world part—it sounded too big, too impossible.  So we wrote about South America, won the grant, and began fundraising our faces off, writing letters to everyone from our old film professors to our grandmothers’ eye doctors.  We took off for South America and spent three months with large eyes, promising ourselves that it wouldn’t just be South America—we would figure out some way to get ourselves around the rest of the world.  A Scottish man happened to be in a Starbucks in Orange County, where he saw an article about us in Luke’s local newspaper; he called up the reporter and said, “I’d like to make this happen for these kids.”  That got us through Africa and Europe.   Then the economy crashed, our funding ran dry, and we got more creative:  we slept on friends’ couches, ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, paid the bills by filming weddings and answering fliers that said things like, “Get paid $100 to drink.”  We raised $11,000 from $20 Facebook donations and checks from generous strangers who said things like, “Show the world America speaks the same language; show America the world speaks the same language”—and that was enough to get us to China, Japan, and Iran.   We entered a Melrose Mac contest, showed our trailer, and won $10,000 worth of equipment; we carted the editing systems between apartments—(“my cousin’s gone this weekend, we can work at her place,” “The bedroom on Craigslist is big enough to fit a computer in the corner,”)—and spent six months sitting huddled around the computer, editing 400 hours of footage into 90 minutes.  And on March 14^th, we made our international premiere at South by Southwest. 

It was the trip of a lifetime, and when that last flight from Tehran to London to Los Angeles landed, it was hard for us to grasp that it had ended.  Over the past three years, we’d slept in twenty-five countries, navigated fifteen languages, reversed down two main highways, and gotten mugged in Argentina, attacked by a baboon in Kenya, detained in Israel, and reported to the Iranian government.  We ate pig’s tail in Trinidad, chicken claws in China, and fresh lamb on a farm in Uruguay as a hundred sheep stared at us accusingly.   We drank warm post-game Fanta in a prison in Bolivia and a villa in Argentina, sipped tea with Iranian firemen, and shared beers with eighty-year-old Brazilians who play barefoot on Sunday mornings.  We contracted pink eye and a stomach parasite (actually that was only Ryan).   We took an eight-hour ride on a bus with a broken window during the harsh Bolivian winter, got immunized for yellow fever twice (having lost the small immunization card), and rode old commuter trains through the Hungarian countryside.  We juggled the ball on the cobblestone streets of Paris with a man wearing dress shoes, business slacks, and an Angora sweater; we juggled the ball with the Togolese border control; we juggled the ball with two female security guards in Iran:  we came away awed by the game the entire world plays.  

To watch a preview of soccer movie pelada, please click here