Streetball

Starting off with the assertion that, despite the end of apartheid, South Africa is still plagued by grinding poverty, violence, and crime, this poignant underdog documentary focuses on the country's entrants in the 2008 Homeless World Cup in Melbourne—a power-of-sports project in which soccer transforms social outcasts and outlaws into aspiring athletic champions, theoretically helping to set them on a positive path to redemption/recovery. South Africa's hard-luck lineup contains ex-convicts (some just barely “ex”), former gangsters, and tremulously reformed drug addicts. Some at-risk players commit wholeheartedly to the team, while others drop out or tend to disappear into the mean streets (some come back). The non-traditional structure employed by filmmaker Demetrius Wren does not build to the Big Game (on-field soccer action is actually brief, fragmentary, and stylized), but instead follows the men pulling together during their trip to Australia and then describing their varied fortunes afterwards, with pitifully few tidy, happy endings. As one interviewee says, much work still remains to be done. DVD extras include featurettes focusing on contemporary South African street culture in art, music, and freestyle slam-poetry. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)