We don’t normally get to see the work that goes into creating the complexes and laying the fields of colossal sporting stadiums. We just see the finished result. In the case of the 2016 Summer Olympics, we saw more than anybody would have liked us to see. The venues where events were supposed to take place remained incomplete only weeks ahead of the opening ceremonies; news footage made Rio de Janeiro look like a sprawling construction site rather than the host city for the world’s most prominent international sporting brouhaha. (In fairness, Rio isn’t the first host city to run into Olympic-sized logistical obstacles. Beijing comes to mind. Vancouver, too.)
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So consider Adam Sobel’s film “The Workers Cup” a rare honor, an explicit glimpse behind the scenes of the arduous, interminable process by which such an arena is erected. It’s also a movie about people, as you might expect from its title; Sobel’s subjects are the migrant workers recruited from Asian, African, and Arab nations to assist in assembling the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, each employed by hundreds of companies from around the world. In fact, the film is primarily about them and only tangentially about the infrastructure. The World Cup is mere window dressing, an incidental element to Sobel’s point of focus. If the film pulls the back curtain on the immensity of engineering a building big enough to house the population of a small city, it’s only to acquaint us with the men responsible for making it happen.
“The Workers Cup” is a story of workers’ rights and corporate abuses. Ostensibly it’s about large, faceless businesses doing something good for their recruits: The movie’s name refers to a soccer tournament staged by the countless entities overseeing production on the World Cup stadium in Qatar, intended to raise morale and promote team-building, with monetary rewards handed out to the winning team. Sobel pretty much exclusively spends his time with laborers hired by Gulf Contracting Co. (GCC), acquainting us with their employees, who have come from all over the globe — Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, India — to earn their wages: Kenneth, Padam, Paul, Dean, Umesh, Sebastian, Calton. They’re good men, from what we see, but they’re also struggling with isolation and crushing loneliness on top of economic anxiety.
They’re also slaves, for all intents and purposes. The amount of access Sobel has to the workers, to the camps they live in, and to their very lives is jaw-dropping, and he’s able to pull back the curtain far enough to let us see into the functions of GCC and its competitors, as well as hear the harsh, blunt truth from the workers themselves about their circumstances. We’re nowhere near plantation culture, but the amount of control companies have over their workers is sobering. A man can’t change jobs, or quit his job, or even leave Qatar, for example, without permission from his company, something we learn in the first few minutes of “The Workers Cup” via title cards after we meet Kenneth and learn that he was scammed into traveling to work for GCC to begin with.
It isn’t until about half an hour later that sovereignty is broached as a topic of conversation, when a few of the guys sit down for lunch and reminisce about the things they miss from back home: fish, girls, and, well, freedom. “Generally, what do you think freedom is? The way you understand freedom to be? What is your imagination of freedom?” Paul asks his colleagues. It means being able to move, to express feelings; it means, according to one man who quotes Bob Marley, emancipating yourself from mental slavery. Listening to them talk is deeply humbling. These are thoughts Americans often take for granted, and “The Workers Cup” gently forces us to consider what it literally means to be free when your existence is, in essence, determined by the people you work for. (Once you’re done listening to Marley, maybe throw on “Sixteen Tons.” Feels relevant.)
It’s easy to imagine Sobel shaping his film solely around the tournament and spinning this story as uplifting and positive. This isn’t to say that there isn’t uplift and positivity to be found here, but rather that “The Workers Cup” stumbles upon both in only fleeting traces, and that they’re vastly overshadowed by the iniquities it portrays. Soccer gives these men an escape from their reality, but their reality sucks. It’s a prison. It’s a vicious system whose gravitational pull they’re helplessly caught in; they can go home, but they almost inevitably return to Qatar for work, because there’s no work back home to speak of. Paul has a particularly harrowing backstory: He used to work at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi until al-Shabaab shot the place up in a terrorist attack in 2013. He lost his job when the mall shut down in the aftermath.
Hearing him relay all of this horror to Sobel’s camera will sicken your heart on multiple levels. Paul’s personal tragedy is simply horrific in its own context, but in the context of “The Workers Cup,” it becomes a different kind of tragedy. These are the people that companies like GCC prey on, people who have literally no other option than to leave their countries and go to a foreign land where they know nobody and don’t speak the language to work for insultingly low wages in an area that they’re restricted from fully experiencing themselves. More than a documentary, the film is an exposé on the world of global capitalism’s callousness that handily demonstrates their inhumanity; it’s a tale of architecture founded by the blood of the common man, an angry paean made to celebrate them. [B]
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