The latest documentary from Kartemquin Educational Films, In the Game profiles the girls’ soccer team at a large public high school on Chicago’s southwest side. To call it a sports movie, though, would be selling it short. Director Maria Finitzo uses the school’s soccer program to address larger issues about public education and social inequality in Chicago. As a school administrator informs us, more than 80 percent of the student body at Kelly High School (where the movie was shot) live around the poverty line. Not only that, but the school has been long underfunded, forcing teachers and staff to assist students with fewer resources than they need. Finitzo inspires warm admiration for the soccer team’s dedicated coach, Stan Mietus, who teaches his players to take pride in themselves no matter where they’re from. Yet Coach Stan’s lessons help only so much.
I thought I was going to find that Kelly High School [whose student body is more than three-quarters Latino] was this school that didn’t do enough for the girls and the boys got all the resources, but that’s not what I found at all. It wasn’t as if the boys had everything [for sports] at Kelly and the girls had nothing—none of those kids had enough. Kelly High School is really dedicated to its students—everybody there does an extraordinary job of trying to educate them. It’s just that the resources for schools in communities of color are less than in other places. So the film became a story about equality, across the board.
I didn’t want to show the valedictorians at Kelly. I wasn’t looking for those girls. I wanted to pick three young women who had some leadership skills on the soccer team and who seemed motivated in school. Sometimes you see these films about the kids [at inner-city schools] who end up at Yale or Harvard, and it’s true that those kids exist. But there are also a lot of kids for whom it would be great if they could just get themselves to UIC, but they don’t know how.
You must have accumulated a lot of footage after shooting for so many years.
