‘Little Azkals’ Review: Small film, big heart

The easiest thing for Baby Ruth Villarama to do is to simply shoot and allow the soccer kids to adorably charm their audience. The story of the kids, who were chosen from all over the Philippines to participate in a training camp in Britain in preparation for the country’s bid for the World Cup in 2019, is rosy enough to pass off as erstwhile entertainment, even without any effort at style or artistry.

Fortunately, Villarama has more ambition for her material. This is exactly what her humble documentary needed to transcend being simply a promotional gimmick for a hopeful sports team, into something more. As a result, there is never a moment in Little Azkals that it felt too syrupy or manipulative, which is unlike a lot of other documentaries of its ilk.

Villarama is not content in only telling the story of her little heroes. She also revels at the story’s implications. Without straying too far from the documentary’s goal of inspiring its audience, Villarama also manages to inject sharp observations on various factors that make the Philippines’ quest for football gold extraordinarily difficult.

Little Azkals is not just an inspiring tale of children dreaming big, it is also a carefully designed exposé. 

Close and intimate 

It is evident that Villarama has become close enough with his subjects to be able to observe them not from the perspective of an outsider looking in but from a position of close proximity. The children do not come off as overly conscious about being filmed or exhaustively and annoyingly artificial.

Villarama relishes in showing the kids being kids. They are seen goofing around, teasing each other, and bawling out of homesickness. It almost comes off as an afterthought that they are also athletes with the huge responsibility of representing the Philippines in a foreign land. 

More importantly, the side stories that Villarama was able to capture on camera are sufficiently drawn out. One example: the filling up of the government-required travel guardian’s forms and the ensuing confusion nearly had one of the players pass up his trip to England; there’s another subplot about one child’s selfless birthday wish.

Villarama has a knack for detecting these seemingly innocent details that when melded together produce a distinctly emotional whole.

Villarama consistently switches her emphasis, from childlike fragility to Filipino resilience, from innocent horseplaying to tense competition. It is this balancing act that Villarama manages to pull off that makes Little Azkals such an exhilarating ride.  

Technically sound

Little Azkals never feels like it was shot on a shoestring budget, despite the fact that it was. Villarama, who shot the England scenes by herself, was able to produce a look appropriate for the story she wants to tell. 

Most of her chitchats with the kids are done in their bedrooms. A lot of her interviews with their coaches are done while they are doing their laundry, or while they are at work. This creates an atmosphere of delightful intimacy, making a lot of the required talking heads and soundbites feel a tad less tedious to bear. 

Little Azkals is not solely Villarama’s triumph. Editor Chuck Gutierrez adeptly stitches the scenes together to create a narrative that never feels disjointed despite the abundance of threads and details. Aided by Von de Guzman’s indelible music, Villarama was able to concoct a visually dazzling medley of images that simply never lets its audience’s imagination stray too far away from the thumping heart of her work. 

 

 

More than just a sports story 

As previously mentioned, Little Azkals is not just a document of the soccer kids’ adventures in England. Like her Jazz in Love, which started out with an amiable man preparing for his German boyfriend’s visit to the Philippines, only to end up discovering differences between them that seem to outweigh their love for each other, Little Azkals fronts cuteness and charm to raise significant observations.

Villarama, through her interviews with the kids and their parents which reflect a stark difference in their use of language or their motivations for taking part in the sport, subtly reveals economic and social gaps that distinguish the kids from each other. Against the backdrop of their experiences in a first world country, their reactions, humorous at first, further reveal the distinction.

Thankfully, Villarama does not belabor the point. She knows that the film is not and should not be about social structures. However, she also acknowledges that these points have to be addressed to tell the complete story of these children. 

The Philippines’ football story is after all not just a simple sports story replete with competitions of pure strength and skill. It is beautifully laced with struggles, of overcoming obscurity against more popular games like basketball and boxing, of withstanding poverty and scarcity of resources, of becoming champions despite all the odds.

Villarama ends her story in the Philippines, following one of the kids who got to train in the topnotch facilities of England back to his humble home in Mindanao. The fairytale has ended. With a conclusion that suddenly grounds it back to reality, Little Azkals sums up all the joys and frustrations of the beloved sport it painstakingly paints with such bright and cheerful colors. – Rappler.com

(Little Azkals is showing in select SM Cinemas on October 25 and 26, 2014)

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.