Ole Schulz

All soccer fans know these moments of „What would have happened, when...?“.

If the normally so brilliantly playing defender of the own team, would have attended better, yes, then… Take, for example, the Champions League final from 1999: After 90 minutes Bayern Munich had a 1-0 lead. But ManU scored two goals within three minutes in injury time and won with 2-1. If ManU-striker Ole-Gunnar Solskjær would have guarded better, then...

The Italian-Argentine film „The Lost World Cup” (2011), directed by Lorenzo Garzella and Filippo Macelloni, who premiered in Germany at the „11mm” Football Film Festival in Berlin, plays in a way with such a „What, if...?” momentum. In the press release they say the film „presents the true story of the 1942 World Soccer Championship” in far-off Patagonia – a story „never acknowledged by the official sports organizations and shrouded for decades in legend without any real winner being stated, is now fully revealed“.

Starting point is the discovery of a skeleton with a movie camera in Patagonia – which proved to be the human remains of an Argentine cameraman, who had been engaged to film the Championship „in a memorable and revolutionary way”, and which provides the missing piece of the mysterious World Cup of 1942. Teams made up of a few professional players mixed together with immigrants from around the world, laborers and miners, engineers and former gold prospectors, circus acrobats and exiled revolutionaries, Nazi soldiers and Mapuche Indians.

But to be honest with you: „The Lost World Cup“ is a Mockumentary, a fake documentary, – and, for sure, a nice one. Based on a short story from Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano („The sun of Butch Cassidy”) the film takes us not only to Argentina but also to Italy, England, Germany, and Brazil to discover the „truth”. But mostly you see you see a lot of – supposed – old black and white photographs and film shootings (shot in Super 8) from the Patagonian World Cup.  You have to decide on your own, if you believe what you see. Even some interviews with ex-footballers like Roberto Baggio, Gary Lineker and  Jorge Valdano about the event are part of the film.

Especially lovely is the handful of absurd storylines: There is the son of bandit Butch Cassidy (who escaped from the States to Patagonia in „real life”) with Stetson und pistol as the referee of the Cup, the numerous inventions of the provincial cameraman to cover the football games better (as you can see he played part in inventing the goal-line technology as well), a young and beautiful Jewish-German photographer woman, who not only made the German, glasses-wearing star player mad, but also the smart goalie of the Mapuche team.

At the end the Nazi-Germans are facing the Mapuche Indians in the final – and it looks like that the Jewish-German blond´s relationship to both players is… decisive for the outcome – or should we say: … could have been decisive?

The directors say the film is about the history of „sports, literature and cinema”, an „ironic reflection on the dialectics between nowadays globalized and commodified soccer and its romantic, universal soul”. And that´s for sure:  In a world back then, which Garzella and Macelloni let revive, when not every second of the 90 minutes was filmed yet, when not every detail of the surroundings were observed by cameras, it was easier to create myths and legends, let one's imagination run wild – as Jorge Valdano mentions in „The Lost World Cup“.

At the end of „11mm" 2013 the fake documentary won the „Golden 11”, the audience award of the Berlin Soccer Film Festival!