Men in the Arena (2017)
★★ — Men in the Arena (2017)
Somalia has had a national football team since 1951, but the country's near-continuous civil conflict since the early 1990s has made competitive football something closer to an act of defiance than a recreational pastime. By the mid-2010s, Al-Shabaab's hold over large parts of the country meant that players and supporters alike faced genuine danger simply by turning up. It is against that backdrop that Men in the Arena (2017) situates itself, following two teenage members of the Somali national squad, Saadiq and Sa'ad, as they chase the kind of futures that players from more stable nations take entirely for granted. The film was produced under the banner of 2728 Pictures and shot across Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and the United States, a geographical spread that alone tells you something about how difficult it is to tell this story from within the country itself. At 86 minutes it sits comfortably in the single-sitting documentary format, and its subject matter places it in the same broad territory as other football documentaries that use the sport as a lens onto something much larger, among them Next Goal Wins (2014), which covers a similarly underdog national-team story.
The film was directed by J.R. Biersmith, working here on a subject that demands a careful balance between reportage and personal storytelling. Documentaries about conflict zones and their young people carry an obvious responsibility, and the choice to follow two specific individuals rather than attempt a broader survey of Somali football is a sensible structural one. Saadiq, seventeen at the time of filming, finds a route to America and the possibility of education alongside his football ambitions, while the older Sa'ad remains in Mogadishu, the two friends' lives diverging along separate but parallel tracks. It is the kind of human-scale framing that can, at its best, make geopolitical realities feel genuinely personal, and the film shares a certain spirit with other East African productions that find their drama in everyday lives under pressure, such as Nairobi Half Life (2012). The production also connects to the wider Kenyan film ecosystem that has produced affecting character-centred stories, including Supa Modo (2018). As for the cast, the credited principals are the two young footballers themselves rather than professional actors, which gives the film its documentary authenticity but also places considerable weight on how much its subjects are willing and able to open up on camera.
There is no shortage of raw material here. The spectre of Al-Shabaab looms over everything, the organisation having explicitly targeted public gatherings including football matches, and the stakes for both young men are about as real as stakes get. Whether the film fully capitalises on that material is something the review below addresses directly.
A-Z World Movie Tour. Djibouti This is a documentary about 2 men in their late teens who play for the Somali national team. They both suffer hardships mostly as a result of the poverty and oppression in Somalia. It's a pretty surface level I feel. Because of the fear of reprisals from Al Shabab, (the radical islamists who control most of Somalia) nobody cares to speak about how they actually feel about everything and you can tell. Needed more depth really but it was relatively interesting.
For me, that sense of people holding back is the documentary's central problem, and it is one that no amount of skilful editing can entirely paper over. When your subjects are understandably guarded, you need exceptional access or exceptional craft elsewhere to compensate, and I am not sure this one quite finds it. That said, I do not want to be too hard on a film that is clearly made with genuine feeling for its two subjects, and there is something worthwhile in simply putting Saadiq and Sa'ad on screen and letting their situation speak. It just leaves you wishing someone had found a way to get closer to what it all actually feels like from the inside. A decent watch, but one that keeps you at arm's length when it could have let you in.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-06-10
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