Champions

This tender and beautifully made movie is quite obvious and predictable. But it is worth to sacrifice originality when your goal is to focus in the moral message. And this movie has a strong an powerful moral message, so overwhelming that it makes you feel almost like in a church listening a sermon of an old and good hearted priest. It is like 2 hours of visual Aesop greek fables where the characters, instead of animals, are archetypical humans. The most important critic is to our own Spanish history: the National Basketball team cheated in the Paralympic Games of Sydney 2000, because 10 out of 12 of our basketball players did not have any mental disability. They won the gold medal, but they had to return it afterwards. Also the film showcases the extraordinary negative consequences of hyper protective parenthood in raising narcissistic people, completely immature in their 30s an 40s to the point that they can not endure the risks and challenges of sustaining a relationship, facing rejection or creating a family. Specially consistent during the whole film is the critic to our society, based in success over experience, performance over playfulness, fitness over kindness, dominance over community. Finally, the most subtle but powerful subversive message in the movie is questioning to which extent are sick and poisoned the people that consider ourselves "normal". Much of our "normality" might be counter productive, to the point to make us too rigid, cold hearted and stressed because of our own insane standards. All the special basketball players of this special team show us that most of the times it's ok to look silly, to do something stupid or to fail constantly, because they still have each other. So many of us can not say the same.

This movie is such a nice, entertaining, sweet and tender way of reflecting about all these moral values. It's been selected to compete for the Oscar to the best foreign film, but honestly I think they have no chance. We are still too much into an Instagram Age to take a movie like this one seriously.