Proper grass roots football
Earlier this year I had the chance to see, and interview the creators of, a beautifully funny and sweet documentary about the ultimate in football underdogs.
I wasn’t the only one that fell in love with it. It won the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival, and is now on limited distribution at indie cinemas and arts venues around the country. If it’s on near you, get yourself along asap, even if you hate football. You won’t regret it.
“It's the glacier that Jules Verne wrote about in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s actually, in his words, the entrance to the centre of the earth. So there’s magic in the area as well. That was one of the things that kind of hooked us.”
Smari Gunn is talking about the Snaefellsjokull glacier which overlooks the tiny Icelandic fishing village of Hellissandur. Around three hours drive north of Reykjavik, it boasts 369 residents, a shop, some houses, a school and an arts space
It also boasts perhaps one of the most beautiful football pitches ever created. Reminiscent of the ground on Eriskay, and hewn from the ash and rock of a lava field, local coach Vidar Gylfson created it in the mid 1990s with the dream of hosting the town’s first ever Icelandic FA Cup game on it.
Fate had other ideas though. For their first game, Reynir FC were instead handed an away trip, to face the Golfclub of Grindavik FC. The debutants were promptly gubbed 10-0, Vidar gave up on football and the pitch, virtually unused for the next quarter of a century, never had that inaugural game.
This is the story behind The Home Game, which aired to rightful acclaim at the Glasgow Film Festival in March, winning the Audience Award as the public’s favourite film of the event.
A beautiful shot, amusingly told, and cynicism free story of generational redemption, community spirit and the joy of grassroots activity, it’s probably the best advert Iceland has had since Game of Thrones packed up shop.
Shot over the course of a year, it follows Vidar’s son Kari trying to correct a 25-year-old wrong and give the football pitch the home cup tie to inaugurate it Gylfson missed out on.
To do it, he needs to build a team from scratch - from local would-be rapper kids to the now dadbodied remaining active players of the 10-0 defeat - and enter them in the Cup.
“They’ve got a sense of humour about themselves,” says Gunn.
“Obviously what happened there 25 years ago, when they lost against the golf club, 10-0. It was embarrassing for them. And it was kind of swept under the carpet, and no one wants to talk about it.”
“I didn't even know about that game,” chips in Logi Sigursveinsson, his co-director of the film. “And I lived there for, like, 17 years, living in the next town. No-one talked about it.”
Both Gunn and Sigursveinsson are unashamedly close to their subject matter. Both have known Kari Vidarson since their youth. In 2000, as the world slowly came to terms with Covid, lockdown and a changed way of life, they found themselves, separately, contacted by him with an idea to resurrect Reynir FC.
The pair, who didn’t know each other before joining forces to make the film, had to work round the restrictions of coronavirus and of distance - with Smari based in London and Logi in Iceland, it meant lots of remote communication and having to plan round weekends to make sure they could shoot.
“People were definitely a bit sceptical, a bit tentative to start with,” admits Gunn.
“His very best friends would humour him and go to training with him to start with. And then people were just looking out their window, seeing them going into training twice a week. And then they just started turning up.”
And turn up they do. By the day of the big match Reynir FC has more than 30 players - including a local baker, a couple of 15 year olds, a Portuguese immigrant and a former Icelandic women’s international.
The ragtag group find themselves training through the brutal Icelandic winter conditions, helping to clear the frozen pitch from 12cm of subsurface ice - and even rapping a new team song.
“I think Kari also has that kind of charm in that town that whenever he takes on big crazy projects, when he asks, people just say yes because they believe in his kind of energy.”
As the film shows, the Reynir spirit - where everyone should be allowed to play football, regardless of age, ability or gender - slightly rubs up against the rules of the Icelandic Cup, if not its spirit.
An added complication comes when the draw for the first round hands the team their desired home game... But their opponents are one of the top sides in the Icelandic second tier.
For context, it would be the equivalent of your local pub side drawing Leeds or Dundee United.
The moment when the team discover they’ve landed their home game did leave the directors with a bit of a scramble thanks to a lack of warning from the KSI - the Icelandic FA.
“We asked to be kind of in the loop when they do the draw, because we wanted to film the real reaction to the draw and they were always like, yeah, we'll let you know,” admits Gunn.
“It was a really funny thing. They let us know on a Tuesday, after we've done a long weekend of filming from Thursday to Monday. We decided to stay in Hellissandur for a day just to hang out with Kari and chill out.
“Logi went back to Reykjavik, which is three hours away - and then we got an email at 10am from the FA say we're gonna do the draw at lunchtime. So we’re calling Logi and our other cameraman… ‘Guys, jump in a car!’ And we had to put the whole team on the sheet. They like all had to like quit their jobs on the day, and went to the freezer.
“We took all their phones so we could get like a genuine reaction. But to be fair to the FA, with the film coming out, they've been our biggest supporters. They've been so helpful.”
Unsurprisingly the film has been hugely popular wherever it’s screened, with the Glasgow audience voting it their top film of the 2024 festival - beating off the likes of Viggo Mortensen and Maxine Peake to the honour.
Although it hasn’t yet landed wide distribution, it seems only a matter of time before it’s being seen by a wider audience than just the festival circuit.
“People laugh at slightly different places but usually they have tears in their eyes and a smile on their face when they leave,” says Gunn.
“It’s a very local story, but it is universal. The themes of the film and the charm of the people.
“But I think we kind of just wanted to make a film that we wanted to watch. Something that will make you feel good.”
The Home Game is on limited release at cinemas across the UK