Everything about Ali El Arabi’s Captains of Za’atari seems custom-made to appeal to a broad public. After all, who doesn’t love an underdog story, this one involving a couple of Syrian teens in a Jordanian refugee camp whose skills at football (European; soccer for Americans) give them a shot at a less circumscribed world? The documentary premiered at Sundance and since then has travelled extensively, racking up multiple distribution deals, and yet apart from Mahmoud Bashir’s dreamily fluid camerawork, Captains is less than master of its material. Too much of it feels staged, as if the boys have been fed their lines, and the workmanlike editing doesn’t build to the expected level of excitement. That hasn’t hampered international play, though ultimately it remains less than the sum of its parts.
Za’atari, located in northern Jordan, is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world, a place much too easy to enter and far too difficult to leave. There’s no real football pitch, and the boys largely play barefoot. Fawzi Qatleesh knows that education has the potential to act as a springboard out of these circumstances, but sport is his passion and could be a quicker and more rewarding way out. Together with his younger friend Mahmoud Dager he dreams of entering the Al Kass International Cup, a tournament held in Qatar for under-17s, but Fawzi has just aged out and despite being the team’s captain, he’s technically not eligible to join his teammates in Doha. At the last minute an exception is made – the documentary skirts over how this happened – and Fawzi arrives in Qatar as the captain of the team named Syrian Dream. That night, after surprising Mahmoud, they sneak onto the football field (well, they couldn’t really have sneaked there since the lights are on and the camera is rolling) and for the first time play with real grass under foot.
Strangely, El Arabi neglects to build much enthusiasm for the games themselves, though one of the few genuinely tense moments comes when Fawzi gets injured and it’s uncertain whether he’ll be able to continue the match. Cross-cutting between the game and his family and friends back in Za’atari glued to an old TV set provides a gratifying moment of unscripted emotion when we see his mother anxiously watching her son’s set-back and then brief moment of triumph. However the tournament doesn’t offer the rosy path out of the refugee camp that Fawzi and Mahmoud (and the director) were hoping for, and the documentary ends with the pair several years later, coaching younger kids in the camp with similar dreams.
For a documentary eight years in the making, Captains of Za’atari feels oddly anemic: the friendship between focused Fawzi and ladies-man Mahmoud is developed to some degree, but we never have a sense of any of the other players, nor much of their coach. It’s fine that El Arabi chose not to detail their previous lives in Syria nor how they got to the camp, but including a little about Fawzi’s family while leaving many questions unanswered makes for unsatisfying cinema. More difficult to overcome though is the sense that so much of this is scripted; few of Fawzi’s conversations feel spontaneous, and while a certain staged quality perhaps guarantees a more artful shot, it also weakens our connection. The two boys here are appealing figures who we want to know better, but unlike, for example, Mayye Zayed’s Lift Like a Girl, the privileged look we’re offered feels overly predetermined.
Much of the praise that’s accrued for the film is rightfully due to Mahmoud Bashir’s handsome cinematography, so attentive to the perfect moment of day when the light is just right and the colors glow with warmth. His artful framing and play with focal depths, together with camerawork that has an energetic yet graceful flow, form the documentary’s most distinctive elements, hindered at times by editing that fails to match Bashir’s rhythm. Music is fortunately underplayed, so while frequently present, it’s neither intrusive nor forcing emotions.
Director: Ali El Arabi
With: Fawzi Qatleesh, Mahmoud Dager
Producer: Ali El Arabi
Co-producers: Aya Dowara, Amjad Abu Alala, Michael Henrichs
Consulting producers: Daniel J. Chalfen, Mark Lotfy
Cinematography: Mahmoud Bashir
Editing: Menna El Shishini
Music: Gil Talmi
Sound: Rana Eid, Cherif Allam, Mohamed Salah
Production companies: Ambient Light (Egypt)
World sales: Dogwoof Sales
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Feature Documentary Competition)
In Arabic
77 minutes
