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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/08/bvdoc108.xml
New documentary In the Hands of the Gods follows five football-mad lads who played keepy-uppy all the way to Buenos Aires. Jasper Rees reports
Put it this way: it's not an ambition shared by every Englishman. In the Hands of the Gods, a new football film from Ben and Gabe Turner, tells of five ordinary working-class boys whose dream is to shake the hand of Diego Maradona. Being in their early twenties, they're far too young to be scarred by 1986 and all that. But let's not go into the defining moment of Latin chicanery now.
The little big man doesn't head this way much, so they came up with the idea of busking their way to Maradona's front door in Buenos Aires by parading their world-class skills at football freestyle. Or keepy-uppy, as we of a certain age call it. They invited a film crew to follow them on their odyssey, and the response was immediate.
"We said, 'It's not going to happen,' " says producer, Leo Pearlman. " 'You've got no money, Maradona lives in Buenos Aires and he probably won't see you.' But they kept coming back to us."
Just to be sure they'd made the right decision, the filmmakers set the five of them a challenge: to spend a day busking in London and earn enough to buy themselves a meal. "We thought they'd be going to Pizza Hut but they ended up having a three-course meal at the Savoy paying in coins out of a bucket which they tipped on to the table."
When the lads subsequently drummed up free flights to New York, the deal was sealed. At this point, the filmmakers - co-directors Ben and Gabe Turner, and producers Pearlman and Ben Winston, most of them related, all in their twenties - had to do their own busking.
They went to film distribution company Lionsgate and pretended to have a rather longer CV than their lone credit for what Pearlman admits is "a kids' show on Sky which wasn't very good". Their football movie was given the green light anyway.
The risk remained considerable. They had no idea if the five freestylers' skills would be enough to earn them their way out of New York, let alone down North America and into South America. But they liked it that way.
"One of our frustrations with TV documentary is the fact that it is so scripted," says Pearlman. "The filmmakers always know before they've even shot it what the ending is going to be."
All he knew was that they had what more interventionist documentary filmmakers might call a "strong brew of characters". These included: a Somalian asylum seeker with a criminal record as a drug dealer; a devout Christian who won't go out in the evenings for fear of seeing scantily clad women; an archetypal Scouse scally; a spivvy Londoner; and, the unspoken leader, a failed football pro whose face wears an almost primordial look of unhealed hurt.
The four filmmakers, accompanied by their crew, imposed rules of utmost stringency. They were there as observers. "To make the film as true as possible," says Winston, "we would not help them at all. They would not be allowed to have a bite of our food, not be able to use our toilet."
These hard-ball tactics paid off. There were low points, particularly in Dallas where (off camera) one freestyler proposed nicking a car to ease their transport problems. But ultimately the insistence that the five fall back on their own resources yielded a compelling journey for five wide-eyed lads through a series of alien cultures, from Las Vegas to Guatemala.
In the Hands of the Gods is not, in the end, a film about keepy-uppy. As the four filmmakers calculated, the narrative lurking somewhere inside 180 hours of footage flowered into a study of character and motivation as, over their journey, the participants were left with no alternative but to unfurl their vulnerabilities in tales of broken homes, dead friends and other excess baggage.
"They go through the full range of emotions in front of your eyes," says Gabe Turner. "We knew that it had to come from them. If they went through all these challenges themselves, then it would be really genuine when they got those moments where they succeeded or failed or interacted with different people and places."
To reveal the denouement would be like blurting out the result of a match, but it suffices to say that the film is like a gruelling cup tie that goes into penalties.
The film's star quarry was hard to pin down on the pitch, as we all know from the other goal he scored against England in 1986. It gives nothing away to say that that remains the case. If Maradona's actions moved you to tears once, don't be surprised if they do so again.
