Passion River Films
Under the guise of shooting a sports film, Adam Sobel’s The Workers Cup lifts the veil on the plight of Qatar’s migrant laborers. It depicts how about 60 percent of Qatar’s population lives in what Sobel calls “the world’s richest country.”
Using the tried and true traditions of sports films including 1994’s Hoop Dreams and 2005’s Murderball, Sobel’s eighty-six-minute documentary sheds light on the conditions of laborers recruited from the Third World to do the blue collar work at the Persian Gulf country. It follows workers lured from Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, and India by the promise of better lives in order to build the stadiums and infrastructure related to Qatar’s 2022 hosting of the FIFA World Cup, arguably the planet’s most popular sports competition.
The film is about a tournament that takes place among the two dozen construction companies building an arena for the event, in the same arenas. It focuses on the African and Asian employees of the Gulf Contracting Company (GCC) who suit up to compete.
Among them is Kenneth, age twenty-one, who according to the filmmakers was lied to by a recruiting agent and tricked into traveling from Ghana to Qatar in order to play for a professional football club. Instead, Kenneth’s job was in the construction industry. Samuel, on the other hand, actually was a goalkeeper in Ghana but couldn’t earn enough money to live there, so the twenty-four-year-old relocated to Qatar. (The film, which is mostly in English, does not use the workers’ last names.)
The filmmaker skillfully subverts the sports film formula of success. Instead, Cup shows how the football competition, like the promises that lured these laborers overseas, has been an illusion.
In a way, competing for the Workers Cup seems to make these workers dreams come true. The tournament takes the GCC’s players out of their blue collar ghetto, where Qatar’s 1.6 million overseas laborers are, by law, segregated from the rest of the peninsula. According to Sobel, the event’s sponsors “wanted to show the world through this tournament that they were taking migrants’ rights seriously.”
As the GCC team trains and competes for prestige and prize money, Cup’s cameras are given unprecedented access to the Umm Salal Camp. Here, workers exist in cramped barracks, cook in assembly line-like kitchens, eat en masse in dining halls, and shower in communal bathrooms. Although Cup doesn’t dwell on their working and living conditions, it reveals the the huge gulf between guest workers and the Gulf State’s elite in Qatar’s capital city of Doha.
While the majority of its residents are crammed into labor camps, Doha boasts a futuristic cityscape of skyscrapers, which are off-limits to the same construction workers who built them. The laborers are only allowed into the glittering malls on a limited basis; but, as one Cup migrant muses, they can’t afford to buy any of the high-ticket items anyway.
The film notes that while wages may be higher in Qatar than they are in Kenya or India, they fall far short of fulfilling the dreams that led these workers abroad. Sobel, who lived in Qatar for five years, says monthly blue-collar paychecks average about $400 in a country where labor regulations are not regularly enforced and overtime and seven-day work weeks are common.
Cup explores the private lives of hard-working men enduring adverse conditions, separated from their homelands, families, and, for the most part, the company of women. After eight years on the job in Qatar, twenty-eight-year-old Padam remains unable to bring his wife to Qatar, and he has to decide whether to continue working there or returning home to Nepal. Paul, a twenty-one-year-old Kenyan, yearns to meet a girl and declines to tell the Doha-based domestic servant he communicates with on Facebook that he lives in a labor camp. Homesickness is a common affliction.
The tournament seems to offer the GCC teammates a way out of their rut. The documentary follows them from match to match, as the footballers pursue a cash award and the prospect of escaping grueling physical labor. Like other sports movies, from the Blacklist-era classic The Little Giants to 1976’s The Bad News Bears, to 1986’s Hoosiers, the audience watches the progress of a team of unlikely underdogs. Will GCC win the soccer championship?
Sobel, however, skillfully subverts the sports film formula of success. Instead, Cup shows how the football competition, like the promises that lured these laborers overseas, has been an illusion. And it exposes the hidden motivations of the tournament organizing committee and participating companies.
Much is made nowadays about immigrants and migrant workers in Trump’s America. The Workers Cup goes behind the Qatari Curtain to reveal how overseas laborers live, work, and dream.
The Workers Cup opens June 8 in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and in New York at the Museum of the Moving Image, and on June 24 in Seattle at the Grand Illusion Cinema. Starting June 8, the film can also be seen as VOD on the following platforms: iTunes, Microsoft Xbox, Amazon, and Google Play. The Workers Cup will be on the PBS “POV” program on July 9, 2018.
Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive. The third edition of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, which Rampell co-authored, has just been published.