Quidditch is a sport that had its beginnings in a fantasy world, but it is now played by hundreds of teams around the world. Directed by Farzad Sangari, Mudbloods: A Film about Quidditch is a documentary centred around the UCLA quidditch team and their journey to qualifying and playing in the Fifth Annual Quidditch World Cup in New York City.
Providing a window into the world of quidditch as a college sport, and as a space where athletic prowess meets a passion for the books, it not only captures days in the life of quidditch players, but also highlights the struggles they face in trying to be accepted as real athletes.
As a sport where players run with a broom between their legs, and the snitch is a tennis ball tucked into a sock and attached to the snitch runner’s waist, quidditch may be easily misconceived as child’s play, something fun but not serious enough to be a collegiate-level sport.
But quidditch is a full-contact sport, and the fact that players have to run with a broom between their legs means that they must play the game effectively with only one hand. That takes skill.
Ironically, the people who misunderstand the sport are generally other athletes. While it’s easy to see players as nerds and geeks when you’ve never played, as one UCLA quidditch player puts it, “Once you interact with it on an athletic level, you understand.” That is the main goal of the documentary, to spread awareness about the sport and to encourage its acceptance.
On a stylistic level, the documentary symbolically and smartly incorporates graphic art, reducing and inflating real three-dimensional, colourful characters into two-dimensional, black-and-white figures. Not only does this add a fun, artistic edge to the film, but more importantly, it represents the adaptation of an idea on a page into a real sport, as Sangari intended.
I think the film sends across a brilliant message: the end of a good book should not mean merely closing it, but lifting ideas right out of its pages and adopting them in your life.
The documentary is inspiring because it follows the struggle of the underdog. At the time of filming, quidditch players were a pretty marginalized group, on the fringe enough to have people video-taping them on the field as if they were doing something completely foreign and weird.
Incorporating the perspectives of the Commissioner of the International Quidditch Association, Alex Benepe, and Katie Aiani, the #1 Harry Potter fan as voted by Box Office Magazine in 2010, the documentary sheds light on the game of quidditch from a variety of angles, and captures the hard work and hopes of people who are passionate and driven enough to achieve their dreams.
It is a very uplifting film, the kind that makes you want to get up and found your own club, take your life into your own hands, and not let yourself be defined by people who don’t understand you.
At the end of the movie, the viewer discovers that Benepe brought quidditch to the London Olympic Games — I let out my own little cheer because, by then, I had come to think of quidditch as something worth fighting for, for all the things it represents.
I recommend checking out Mudbloods, and if you’re looking for something closer to home, consider joining SFU’s very own quidditch team.
