In 2017, filmmaker Adam Sobel released a documentary about the Qatar World Cup that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with it.

Sobel spent 5 years in Qatar getting access nobody else had managed to get. The film that came out of it is one of the most considered pieces of documentary filmmaking the World Cup has ever produced.

A regular came into the house this weekend. Big football fan. Italian from Rome. He started talking about the absence of the national team and how it feels watching a World Cup without them in it. Again. I felt it too. Somewhere in that conversation this film came up and we haven't been able to stop thinking about it since in here.

The Workers Cup follows a group of migrant workers from India, Kenya, Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines living inside the Umm Salal Camp, a labour camp housing 4,000 men hidden between a highway and a remote stretch of desert on the outskirts of Doha. These are the men who built the stadiums. 60% of Qatar's total population during that period were migrant labourers.

The camp was intentionally placed out of sight and almost entirely inaccessible to journalists and cameras. Sobel got in anyway.

What makes the film worth talking about from a creative standpoint is the decision he made once he was inside.

Where most filmmakers would have reached for an exposé, Sobel made a portrait, following a handful of workers as they compete in a football tournament organised for labourers by the same committee running the World Cup, 24 construction companies fielding teams, men who spend 6 days a week building sport's biggest stage getting 1 afternoon a week to play on one of their own. 

The tournament gives the film its structure but what Sobel is really interested in is what football means to people for whom it represents the only available version of freedom.

Sobel understood that access alone is never enough. The way you use it is everything. By choosing to follow the men rather than the system and by letting ambition, aspiration and the particular kind of hope that survives very difficult circumstances tell the story he made something that outlasts the controversy it could easily have been reduced to. 

That's a creative decision worth studying regardless of the subject matter.

We left it on the counter. It's staying there for the rest of the tournament.

Shot of the good stuff.