Putting football next to cinema, Vietnamese audiences can ask the question: Vietnam is a country with the most passionate love for football, where millions of hearts can beat in unison with every roll of the ball, so why is Vietnamese cinema today extremely lacking in truly attractive football films?
Looking back at the past, we once had a golden age of football films in the 1990s. Although filmmaking techniques were still limited at that time, works such as "Sút dzô sút dzô", "Cô thủ môn tội nghiệp" or "Thủ môn từ trên trời rơi xuống" still made the 8X and 9X generations of audiences flutter. The appeal of those films lies in the truthfulness, meaningful content, reflecting the aspirations of youth and even gathering top players of that time such as Hong Son and Huynh Duc to participate in acting.
Some reasons can be pointed out. First of all, football is the king of sports because of its surprise and fierceness that takes place directly every second. Organizing dribbling, free kicks or disputes in movies in a way that is both beautiful and not "hypocritical" is a very difficult problem for filming techniques and acting of Vietnamese actors. People accept the naivety or humorous style of Stephen Chow in football movies like "The Kungfu Team" 25 years ago. But with art, the style of "seeing someone eat potatoes and carrying apricot blossoms to dig" will definitely fail.
Making a movie about football is not just bringing a whole match to the screen, but telling a story behind the field: the dark corners of transfers, media pressure, injuries, trade-offs or everyday stories. It seems that Vietnamese screenwriters have not yet found a balance between the drama of cinema and the pure sportsmanship, making the content easily cliché or overly dramatic in a forced way.
World cinema has also proven that football is always fertile ground for the seventh art. Therefore, Vietnamese audiences still have the right to hope and wait for films on the football theme with the spirit of "dare to think, dare to do, dare to dream", bringing a new breeze full of energy and emotion to the domestic box office.
