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Sixteen-year-old Barbora Vránková is facing the most pivotal year of her life. As the newly crowned Czech women’s figure skating champion, she will now represent her country at the world championships.
Modern figure skating has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, with Russian women redefining the sport by landing unprecedented quadruple jumps. However, with Russian athletes banned from international competitions due to the war in Ukraine, this season presents a unique opportunity for skaters like Barbora. But it also raises a crucial question: what does the absence of such fierce competition mean for others?
Training at an elite ice rink in Egna, Italy, Barbora spends hours each day, six days a week, honing her craft alongside Europe’s top skaters. Her life is a delicate balancing act between the rigorous discipline of figure skating, homeschooling, and moments with her family. Her ten-year-younger sister, Thea, and her dog, Lucky—her constant companion—offer rare glimpses of comfort and normalcy.
As the jumps get higher, so do the stakes. The mounting physical and psychological pressure takes its toll. Surrounded by accomplished skaters who make it all look effortless, Barbora begins to doubt herself. Italian skater Gabriele Frangipani, who has mastered the quad, becomes a supportive presence, offering encouragement. Yet, even his help doesn’t seem to ease her growing fear.
With heightened expectations from coaches and parents, Barbora’s confidence starts to crack. The pressure becomes so overwhelming that she begins to struggle with even routine triple jumps, leaving her to confront the most significant challenge of her career—finding belief in herself.
Modern figure skating has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, with Russian women redefining the sport by landing unprecedented quadruple jumps. However, with Russian athletes banned from international competitions due to the war in Ukraine, this season presents a unique opportunity for skaters like Barbora. But it also raises a crucial question: what does the absence of such fierce competition mean for others?
Training at an elite ice rink in Egna, Italy, Barbora spends hours each day, six days a week, honing her craft alongside Europe’s top skaters. Her life is a delicate balancing act between the rigorous discipline of figure skating, homeschooling, and moments with her family. Her ten-year-younger sister, Thea, and her dog, Lucky—her constant companion—offer rare glimpses of comfort and normalcy.
As the jumps get higher, so do the stakes. The mounting physical and psychological pressure takes its toll. Surrounded by accomplished skaters who make it all look effortless, Barbora begins to doubt herself. Italian skater Gabriele Frangipani, who has mastered the quad, becomes a supportive presence, offering encouragement. Yet, even his help doesn’t seem to ease her growing fear.
With heightened expectations from coaches and parents, Barbora’s confidence starts to crack. The pressure becomes so overwhelming that she begins to struggle with even routine triple jumps, leaving her to confront the most significant challenge of her career—finding belief in herself.
Back into the Game
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.
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.