CZ

???

90 min

Post production

Back into the Game

Zpátky do hry

Directing: Eliška Andršová Cílková,  Jindřich Andrš

Synopsis

David is twenty-one and has just arrived at Karlov, a therapeutic community on a forest farm. He comes from a secure Prague family, played for the Bohemians football club as a boy, and spent three years addicted to oxycodone, a prescription opioid painkiller. At his first meeting with the therapist Karel, he learns that the treatment will take about ten months. Its aim is to change his whole way of living, and that can't be rushed.

Tomáš is twenty years older and has turned his life around. Behind him is a much longer road, with four prison sentences, meth from the age of twenty-eight and years he would rather not go back to. Today he is out of treatment, working, and still settling old debts. His love of football is the one thing he never lost.

What brings them together is a tournament. Every year the Homeless World Cup, a street football championship, gathers teams from all around the world made up of people living through addiction, homelessness and social exclusion. The Czech squad is picked from men who have finished treatment, and you can play it once in your life.

The film moves between the farm and Seoul. The community is built so that the change has to happen: milking the cow before dawn, cooking for thirty people, reading your life story aloud to the circle, asking the group for permission to move to the next phase. In Seoul the person they have become is put outside for the first time, on a pitch, in front of a crowd, with nothing left to hide behind. Tomáš leads the team as captain, and the role weighs on him more than he expected. Both men spend the tournament working out who they are now.