Grainy and nostalgic footage of a football match in 1988 between two Bucharest teams is accompanied by an off-screen narration from the referee of this match and his son (director Corneliu Porumboiu) watching and discussing the game 25 years later.
Porumboiu, known for interrogating cinematic canons, creates new definitions for documentary with the curious simplicity of this piece, and both his father and he confront this simplicity in their narrative conversation.
As players chase the ball around a snowy pitch, Porumboui’s father shares behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the match he was part of, as well as a less sentimental discussion of the shady political corruption of the country’s football scene; the game took place just one year before the 1989 revolution that toppled the Communist regime in Romania.
Context is fundamental to The Second Game (Al doilea joc); it manifests itself not just in political themes, but in terms of memory, retrospection, father-son relations, the notion of sport as a vehicle of hope and the meta-questioning of changing the context of found footage into cinema.
With the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute.
The Second Game, dir. Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania 2014, 97 mins.
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