Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Brazil, 1963, 35mm, 60 min., b&w, Portuguese w/ English subtitles
Andrade’s feature debut is a documentary portrait of a celebrated soccer player who owes his wondrous abilities to his peculiar physiology – one of his legs is bent inward and the other curves outward. Moving in strange ways, with broken rhythms, the film is divided into roughly three sections: a celebration of soccer itself, weaving moving images and stills into a stream of impressions that at times verges on abstraction; a direct-cinema style look at Garrincha’s daily life and his celebrity; and a study of the player’s performance in Brazil’s back-to-back World Cup final wins, with Garrincha upstaged by star striker Pelé in 1958 and stricken with fever and blending in with his teammates in 1962 – another hero swallowed up. “One of the greatest films ever made about soccer.” — Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT
