‘Pelada’ Features Pickup Games Around the World

For the true soccer purist, “Pelada” is a tribute to those who are in constant search for pick-up games.

The move is an ode to soccer around the globe, but with a twist — the games are played far, far away from manicured fields and are bereft of highly paid players.

Instead, the film, a labor of love among the directors Rebekah Fergusson & Gwendolyn Oxenham (two former Duke University soccer players), Luke Boughen, and Ryan White, might qualify as the soccer world’s answer to man's search for the perfect pick-up game.

In “Pelada,” the four young Americans embark on a six-month odyssey to 25 different countries, playing pickup games in locales that most American tourists avoid. From a prison in Bolivia to a game with bootleggers in Kenya, from freestylers in China to women playing in the hijab in Iran.

After raising roughly $30,000 in financing, the quartet set off for South America in the fall of 2007 and the film’s focus gradually crystallized on Oxenham and Boughen. Boughen had played at Notre Dame and the two met when Oxenham was doing graduate studies in South Bend, Ind.

“Luke and Gwen more embodied the characters as hasbeens,” Fergusson said. “So Ryan and I just picked up the cameras.”

What followed was a pickup game inside the walls of a prison in La Paz, Bolivia.

“You can bribe your way in as a tourist and Luke and I went inside to negotiate a deal,” Fergusson said. “We paid them about $250 to get in. The guards don’t really bother inside the prison. It was a crazy experience in such a scary and frightening environment. It was 5 v 5 on an oddly shaped field, kind of like futsal. And the prisoners were all very skillful.”

Click on the link to see the movie trailer, and to see what it's like to find 'pick-up' all over the world.