Thursday, April 22, 2010

Tribeca Film Festival 2010: The Two Escobars (Michael Zimbalist and Jeff Zimbalist)

"It's too dangerous to get involved in soccer," offers a thug named Popeye, once a right-hand man to Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, as a lesson he learned from the boss's murder. "Narco-soccer," as it was called back when all the Latin American cartels from Medellin to Cali each owned their own teams, left the drug lords too out in the open. Which also goes a long way to explaining how Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist, co-directors of the riveting and thoroughly researched doc “The Two Escobars,” managed to find such a treasure chest's worth of historical footage. The Escobars of the documentary's title are the infamous Pablo and Colombian soccer hero AndrĂ©s, unrelated and having little in common but a last name, a shared birthplace, a passion for soccer, and the fact that they lived and died under the constant watch of the media eye.

To read the rest visit The House Next Door at Slant Magazine.

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