Copa 71 | Dir: Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine | ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Thanks to Sam Kerr and the Matildas (a word I have just had to add to the computer’s dictionary), many of us have discovered that not only can women play soccer, but they can actually play it incredibly well.
This mind-blowing documentary shows that women were playing soccer on a global scale and viewed by record-breaking audiences in an unofficial Women’s World Cup in Mexico in 1971. But instead of this launching women’s soccer onto the international stage, the event was apparently deleted from history.
How can this have happened? Soccer teams from England, Argentina, Mexico, France, Italy and Denmark played before over 100,000 roaring fans in Mexico City. It was the suited men who ruled the governing body FIFA who dismissed the “immoral and immodest” tournament and went on a rampage to hide all record of it, even banning women from playing a sport to that celebrated “men’s virtues”.
Executive producers Serena Williams and Venus Williams got together a team who got in touch with some of the women who played in the 1971 event, dug out never-seen archival footage and put it all together with a thumping ‘70s soundtrack of female singer-songwriters including Carole King, Nancy Sinatra, Kiki Dee and Lara Saint Paul.
The documentary reveals the enormity of the event and the scale of the injustices that, despite all the female liberation going on at the time, the women could not fight. This historical injustice has affected the next fifty years of women’s sport, and the story is one that needs to be told.
The must-see Copa 71 is also a chance to celebrate the women involved and, in the words of the directors, “having been silenced for so long, hand them back the opportunity to have their voices heard and their experiences acknowledged”.
Copa 71 is the first film to screen at UWA’s Somerville in the Lotterywest film program for the Perth Festival. Gates open at 6pm on Monday 20 November and Tuesday has 2 for 1 tickets available at the venue. It only runs until Sunday 26 November, so get in quick.
Lezly Herbert
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