Football mania grips Mollywood

There is one scene in Captain, where Sathyan meets his betrothed at a bus stop and delivers a dialogue when she speaks with least regard about football and the player he is; that she’d soon be the wife of the Indian football team captain. Pointing to the graffiti of Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar on a wall, the girl responds purposefully to let him down. Instances are many in this movie, where football was weighed down for the celebrity status of cricket. The story is not the same again. The ISL (Indian Super League) fever has crept into M-Town as well. Our filmmakers have sensed it is the right time to strike football stories. The ball game is becoming a popular thread for Malayalam movies, proves Captain, Sudani from Nigeria and the biopic on I.M. Vijayan in the pipeline.

The trendsetter is Prajesh Sen’s Jayasurya movie, Captain. “Football was out of vogue once, arrival of television and inclination towards cricket adding to it. The ISL has come and the same television upped its rating. People have got a reason to return to the sport. The number of tourneys is rising and football frenzy is spiralling up with each passing day. That an ace cricketer is buying a football team shows the market value it has. As the game of football keeps the spirits soaring, cricket lets people stay relaxed at some points. If the stories of the victorious are celebrated, the history of the failed comes with a lesson,” says Prajesh. With the film running successfully for 50 days, Prajesh is compiling hundreds of reviews of Captain that appeared in social media and other spaces to be made into a book. 

Zakariya Mohammed has retained the essence of the sport to tell a movie of human life stories. Sudani from Nigeria is getting good reviews from all corners within days of its release. “Without tagging it as a sports movie, I set football as a backdrop to tell the story from another perspective. It is a story, a family drama that happened because there’s football. Everyone is connected in one way or the other because of it,” says he.  The director’s reference was his life experiences, of being raised in a football lovers’ village in Malappuram. “Football has been the biggest crowd puller in the Malabar region for years. What I grew up watching. Wherever there is a tourney, a crowd would gather in no time. Malappuram conducts the annual sevens tournament every year without fail. ISL and Kerala Blasters have definitely raised its worth. If I were to make a movie, I had a football story in my mind,” says Zakariya. 

About his life story becoming a movie, I.M. Vijayan the legendary player-cum-actor had only one condition about the actor who enacts him on screen. “All I asked Nivin Pauly was if he knows how to play football. He actually knows it and played in his school days. Upon getting injured, he stopped. I am sure he knows how to trap and kick a ball,” smiles Vijayan.  Vijayan and director Arun Gopy have been discussing the movie for about five years. “I narrated my life and story, that’s it. Since I mostly played out of the state, there’s more national perspective to it. Attention to detail is something I feel is important in doing a biographical film. For instance, in Pele: Birth of a Legend, the actor was left-oriented whereas Pele was good at playing with both legs. Nivin is left-handed I know. Let’s see how it comes out,” says Vijayan. He is doing a cop’s role in the Mammootty movie Abrahaminte Santhathikal. 

Arun feels it is his responsibility to tell the story of a legend like Vijayan. “Unlike cricket, football has a culture closely linked to our blood. The game in Malabar is not the same as in Thrissur or Thiruvananthapuram. Thrissur has an unexplored culture. Beach football is the picture in Thiruvananthapuram. If the British played it to relax, the sport was the life and soul for the soccer lovers in Kerala. There was a time when people played with huge cloth balls. Those who lived and died for it— each kick came from their hearts,” he says. Tight-lipped about his project, he reveals the movie would start rolling in 2019.  It is indeed a good start, perhaps Mollywood is left to have an era of football in its history.