Katharina Weingartners film “Sneaker Stories” just won the audience award at the Diagonale Film Festival in Graz. From the official press handout:

In Katharina Weingartner’s first feature film, we meet Adrian, Karl and Aziz, three basketball players in Vienna, Brooklyn and Ghana, and watch as they struggle to find a place for themselves within an international cycle of control and commodification.

In this transglobal documentary, the protagonists live somewhere between fantasies of sports fame and an inglorious everyday reality. Bewitched bythe marketing images and advertisements which dazzle young athletes all over the world, they follow impossible dreams, and lose sight
of their more realistic choices….

Weingartner began work on Sneaker Stories while she was finishing her first documentary, too soon for sorry, and discovered a startling confluence of statistics. Since the mid-nineteen eighties, Nike, the NBA and the hip-hop music industry have all seen their sales triple, as incarceration rates of African-American and Latino men have also exploded threefold. In 2006, Nike’s marketing budget was bigger than the gross domestic product of Ghana.

Sneaker Stories connects the dots, and traces a line from the nineteenth century African slave trade to American industrialization and racism, from the branding of black bodies and inner city poverty to our outsourcing, Nike-economy of today. Sneaker Stories has no narrators, no interviews with scholars or famous basketball players, and no easy answers. Instead, Adrian, Karl and Aziz, three quietly poignant young men, speak for themselves, grapple with their dreams, and hustle through their unspectacular lives, all against a backdrop of coohunting and transnational profit. Scenes with rain clouds and a sort of unhurried poetry wash over us, and we come away with inescapable conclusions.

Link: official Sneaker Stories website

share: