Ten years ago, the Swiss filmmaker Roman Hodel was on the defensive. As he was watching World Cup soccer games with friends, at home and in bars, the rest of the group blasted a referee’s calls; Hodel argued in the referee’s favor. Hodel, like many people, knew some details about the players, even though he wasn’t a diehard soccer fan. The referees were another matter—working on the pitch but unknown to most spectators, they were hidden in plain sight. The imbalance in knowledge excited the young filmmaker. “So a few years later, after my film degree, this idea popped up,” Hodel said. “And I thought, Maybe it’s possible to film.”
Hodel’s documentary “The Game,” released in 2020, represents a return to this long-standing idea. The film follows Fedayi San, a FIFA referee, doing his game-day job under several thousand eyes. He cannot voice a call from the pitch without provoking a reaction. A yellow card throws the stadium spectators, decked in black and gold, into a swarm-like frenzy. After a contested moment on the field, San shouts into his headset that he didn’t stop action because he had “no replay.” “I had to make a decision,” San says to the assistant referees, but his referee coach, facing a monitor and listening in, sucks his teeth in disagreement. Players protest San’s decisions. Watching from on high are San’s nephew and father, seated in the stands and tracking their relative’s every move. (San’s father kindly debriefs him in a car post-match.) Game day, it seems, is a day of judgment; San himself can only see so much.
A filmmaker like Hodel can relate to the referee’s need to reckon with the problem of vantage point. Like the referee, a director faces limits to what he can spot in real time; Hodel’s project required eight cameras and sixteen crew members just to follow San and those around the action during a single match. But the director enjoys the luxury of time and the opportunity to revisit footage as he works to realize his larger vision. Though events in “The Game” seem to occur in a single day, frames that feature figures besides San—the stadium attendees, San’s family in the stands, the referees stalking locker rooms in black vestments—were shot on different game days and in different arenas. The sound of San’s exhalations as he huffs down the pitch is, in some moments, the recorded audio of Hodel’s own breath. “Documentary shouldn’t always be crippled by reality,” Hodel explained. The concrete facts of the filmed matches, like scores and dates, held little interest. Conveying the experience of the soccer referee, so marginal and yet so central a figure on the field, remained the principal goal for Hodel: “So I decided to allow the film this trick.”
Controlling the emotions of thousands via hand signal is surely an awesome power. Nevertheless, Hodel’s film indicates that referees are mostly transfixed by their own mistakes, caught on broadcasts that they stream on their phones during breaks and after games. “I should’ve told you,” a colleague says to San as he views an analysis of his calls. The two sit on a wooden bench and peer at the little screen. “Penalty?” San asks. A commentator’s tinny voice offers his assessment: “It’s not easy for Fedayi San.”
