The Blood of the Common Man
The Workers Cup is a sobering look at global capitalism
By Kahron Spearman, Fri., Nov. 10, 2017
"Don't worry about it. It's only a game."
These are the problematic words of Gulf Contracting Company General Manager Grahame McCaig, following his team's crushing defeat in a 2015 FIFA-sponsored tournament billed the "Workers Cup" – a highly suspect media relations event, featuring disenfranchised employees of state-sponsored corporations responsible for much of the Middle East's hyperdevelopment.
McCaig's flippant remark reveals much about the distressing conditions for the workers, many of whom will build out numerous complexes and stadiums intended for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, for which the bid was "won" by a highly unlikely (or suitable) candidate in Qatar. The complicated relationship between these workers and their hopes and dreams and those of the state and Middle Eastern companies come to the fore in The Workers Cup, a revealing documentary by director Adam Sobel.
Sobel had spent five years in Doha, Qatar, working for a news and current affairs production company alongside Rosie Garthwaite and Ramzy Haddad, his co-producers on the film. He immediately noticed apparent iniquities found throughout the region, where workers arrive from other developing nations – often under inauspicious circumstances – to build out corporate visions.
These workers, specifically for GCC, are virtually bound to their new lives in indentured servitude. Though paid a pittance, making slavery a technically inaccurate term, the "employees" find themselves locked into residence permits allowing the company to control every aspect of their lives.
Other themes touched on in the doc include racial segregation, nationalism, and the company's liberal caste-like system. As a matter of storytelling in acknowledgment of the unseen, women are often spoken about, but make no appearance in the film. Sobel also covers various manifestations of emotional distress with nuance.
"When I moved there, you're immediately aware of the inequality, and it's very strict," explains Sobel of the visible social divisions. "The class systems are so strictly divided in the country."
After producing material eventually starched to the satisfaction of the state apparatus, Sobel saw a prime opportunity within the sanctioned Workers Cup to present a high-risk but authentic vision of workers' lives, often strained out of official media.
"We were trusted," says Sobel. "We had a lot of personal contacts within the higher echelons of committees and other construction sectors."
"I think that's an important note, that just because this is a cold and uncaring system, it doesn't mean that there aren't good people at every step of the way who want to see a change. I think we were able to make this film because we knew enough good people. They gave us their blessing to make the film given that nothing official would be granted."
One of the film's best moments is a shot of a construction foreman almost piercing through the fourth wall, peering through a hoarding board cutout, the facade covering a shopping mall store build-out. The frame includes his face looking into the mall he's expressively forbidden from patronizing. The board itself has an image of a woman in a burqa with her offspring.
"He's talking about his children, and he's sort of standing in as the father figure," explains Sobel. "[His children] are this larger-than-life presence that looms in his mind, on top of the fact that he can never really touch the other side of the wall."
The man rationalizes his sacrifice and diminishment as necessary, providing a familiar testimony for many in his predicament: "It's good for my children that my own life is thrown away."
The Workers Cup (2017) D: Adam Sobel. (NR, 92 min.) Doc Nights. @AFS Cinema, Sunday, 4:30pm; Tuesday, 7pm.
