[ANNOUNCEMENT] KineDok – Infinite Football

The collaboration between the Stari Grad Museum and the KineDok project goes on!

The third film on the programme is the 2018 Romanian documentary film Infinite Football (Fotbal Infinit) directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, on Thursday 25 July at 9pm in the Stari Grad Museum (garden of the Biankini Palace).

They talk about the beautiful game, but for Laurențiu Ginghină, it’s not enough. Football must be modified, streamlined, freed from restraints; corners are to be rounded off, players assigned to zones and subteams, norms revised. In retrospect, he first realized that the rules of football were wrong when he was tackled during a game in his youth, in the summer holidays, on another pitch now covered in snow, but in Vaslui, not Bucharest. The tackle hit so hard it fractured his fibula, a year later his tibia broke too, on New Year’s Eve 1987, he had to walk home in the snow and no one helped him. Today he’s a local bureaucrat with an uninspiring job, it’s no wonder he prefers to talk about the game, his own version of it, to Porumboiu, his friend, the director, who’s always listening, asking questions, nearly always in frame. Ginghină’s monologues are so rich you might think someone wrote them in advance, they proceed from the same old subject, but never stay in one place. All roads lead to football, but all roads lead away from it too, to land ownership issues, to orange farms in Florida, to political utopia and the traces left by life, to version 2.0, 3.1, 4.7, to infinity.

Funny, sad and poignant, this minimalist documentary will fascinate us with the world of a clerk who wants to go beyond his own limits. After The Second Game, director Corneliu Porumboiu returns to documentary and football, and if his first title deals with our relationship with the past, this one deals with potentials for the future and what we leave behind to future generations.

Corneliu Porumboiu was born in 1975 in Vaslui. He studied film at the I.L.Caragiale University in Bucharest and received his degree in 2003. The two short films he directed that same year drew international attention: A Trip to the City (Cinéfondation’s second prize in 2004), followed by Liviu’s Dream. In his first feature film, 12:08 East of Bucharest, Porumboiu offers a very humorous view of Romania’s 1989 revolution. The film was presented in Cannes at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2006 and won the Caméra d’Or. He carried on with a dissection of the Romanian society in Police, Adjective, selected for Un Certain Regard in 2009 (Jury Prize and Fipresci Prize).

The entrance is free!

Watch the film trailer:

You can read more about the KineDok project HERE.