Competing for the Oscars 2022 in the short film documentary category, it is directed by Matthew Ogens.
The film follows Amaree, a teenager who plays on an American football team. The difference is that he is deaf, as well as the coach and all the team members. The team competes for the national championship, playing and beating teams with hearing players. A defeat, after more than 40 victories in a row, made the whole team unite even more towards the common goal, which was to overcome that obstacle and win the championship.
Director Ogens intersperses moments of the team with interviews with some players, among them Amaree, with the adoptive parents of a player who committed suicide at age 15 due to bullying he suffered at the listening school, and with members of the cheerleaders, among them a gay teenager, Amaree's friend, whose first love was just the boy who killed himself.
Although it's a documentary, in the moments when the players are in the locker room or on the field, the scenes felt rehearsed, scripted, not spontaneous. It was as if the director were directing a fiction.
This lack of spontaneity in the teams' scenes is a point that leaves the documentary without life, it doesn't take off, staying in the same way until its conclusion.
The coach's testimony, at the end, is very interesting, as he says that together, the boys overcame the challenges and obstacles of a deaf person on the football field, but he was sure they would face greater obstacles and prejudices when they left that bubble.
