“The holy game is always a religious service. The religious service of the youth.” Clemens Schick’s face is very close to the camera, then he retreats, disappears into a blur, bounces forward again, glowing, steaming. The temperature is enormous. The emotional temperature.
For Pier Paolo Pasolini, football was the last true ritual. You could also say it was the church of the poor, the mass of the suburbs, said on the dusty pitches where those who have nothing play. Pasolini loved the suburbs, this was where the boys were. Those who preferred playing football to delivering packages for criminals. In the film “The Sacred Game”, Clemens Schick becomes Pasolini for half an hour, outraged by the still abundant homophobia in football, by its commercialization, by the fact that young talents are becoming objects of desire – “what are club managers other than the priests of capitalism?”, and the players’ agents are the pimps.
Albert Ostermaier originally wanted to write a libretto for a football opera, then he fell in love with the subject, Pasolini and football, and wrote a furious, heated monologue, which Hans Steinbichler got his hands on. He immediately saw Clemens Schick, the completely fearless extreme actor. And that was actually the end of the film, the monologue, the self-expression. Steinbichler has been world famous since his debut feature film “Hierankl”, i.e. for 20 years; Johanna Wokalek won the Bavarian Film Prize for the film, and other sensational works followed.
Clemens Schick fits in perfectly as Pasolini, as a street urchin, as an idealist who wants to save the game. With his physicality, which is already compelling on the computer screen, his anger, his passion.
“The Sacred Game” can now be seen in the Stadium of Dreams (the evening will be repeated on July 12th at the end of the festival). And because Steinbichler was already there, he decided to do some theater as well, for the first time. Natalia Blok and Friedrich Ani wrote two plays for it, starring Ruth Bohsung and Jakob Tögel, Mira Mazumdar and Gerd Lohmeyer – a triptych of football.
The Sacred Game, Thursday, 27 and Friday, 28 June, 8pm, Black Box at Fat Cat