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Universal scores big: nothing but net for NYTimes article

It appears that the while the sport is slowly gaining in popularity in the States (thanks for the visit Mr.Beckham), that films serving or basing themselves on the sport are fast growing as well. Variety reports that after a massive “bidding war” Universal Pictures have scored the sweet rights to The Fugees.

 

This tells not the story of the now defunct hip hop trio, instead the to-be-scripted by Andrea Berloff and based on the New York Times article by Warren St. John tells the story of a group of kids from such war-torn countries as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan who were placed in Clarkston, Ga., a town that after a few years began to turn against the new arrivals. When a Jordan-born woman named Luma Mufleh arrived, she started a soccer program, cracking the kids' distrust of authority and helping their families cope with new life in the U.S. Mufleh and her players, called the Fugees after “refugees,” overcame much adversity and ended up squaring off against the kids of an elite Atlanta soccer academy.

 

Whether you call it football or soccer, there is more to this sport than getting kids off crack, it blurs language barriers and mixes cultures in a healthy manner especially at this level. For more on this remarkable true life story follow this link: http://www.fugeesfamily.org/.

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Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).

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