Fever Pitch

09.Oct.2011

INTERVIEW TO THE DIRECTOR OF “MANYAS”

It has love, suspense, passion, tears and laughter, but it’s really a film that defies all classification and has hundreds of protagonists.

“I fell in love with football just as later I would fall in love with women: suddenly and with no explanation, without exercising my mind, without thinking about the pain and the suffering that such an experience would bring with it” explains Nick Hornby, at the start of Fever Pitch, the best book ever written about this incurable illness which is football passion.

The passion brought about by football, as Hornby points out, is irrational and allows no choice. Loyalty to colors is an illness without cure, whether you enjoy it or suffer it, and it is the non-transferrable nucleus of the football experience.
The people responsible for “Manyas, the movie” gave life to a documentary that is based on the same philosophy preached by Hornby: football belongs to the supporters and not to the leaders, or the players; its essence is composed of obsessions, unconditional love, misery and the delights footballers go through.
The movie is directed by Andrés Benvenuto and produced by Andrés Rubino, it premiered in Palacio Peñarol and made it to commercial circuits this Friday 7th. Montevideo Portal spoke to Benvenuto about why he had chosen to make a movie which focuses on the fan and not the club or the players.

“I had a conversation with Andrés Rubino, owner of an advertising agency and producer of the documentary who asked me if I wanted to get some info on the biggest flag in the world made by Peñarol in the last Libertadores cup. I went for three days to film it so I could do something for a TV program but visually the images were not much. I didn’t even know if I had enough for just one show, but meanwhile I started to go a little deeper into the world of the fans, which I didn’t know much about . I started to see things that called my attention, like the fact that the flag was made without sponsors, even though they might have made some money off it. I started to see the fans organized.

I’m a fan of Peñarol, not an extreme fan, but at that time I started to see lots of shirtless fans with incredible tattoos and I realized there was a whole world I was unfamiliar with. It reminded me of trekkies, and I realized it was worth doing much more than just filming the flag, I had to make a documentary about the fans, through all the possible angles.

Conceptually there are two parts: the first part is more rational, journalists, sociologists and psychologists speak, and in the second, more emotional part there are anecdotes from the fans, sort of like clips, stories within the stories which thicken the plot and make people go from tears to laughter. This is a movie that has no actual football scenes, because the action is based on the fans”.