One frigid January night off Oranienburger Strasse, in the heart of old Jewish Berlin, 30 immigrants from the former Soviet Union clustered into a small room to hear stand-up poetry and folk music in their native tongue. Almost all of them were middle-aged or elderly and, as they drank tea and smoked pipes in the crowded kitchen afterwards, they reminisced about the world they’d left behind – and the alien one that, today, they only partly inhabit.
In Europe’s latest entanglement over free speech, German officials and Jewish leaders are calling for a ban on a Turkish action film that demonizes Americans and Jews. On Wednesday, Cinemaxx, Germany’s largest theater chain, was the first movie house to respond, announcing that it would strike the film from its program immediately.
After the United States stunned England with a 1-0 victory at the 1950 World Cup, soccer mysteriously died in America. Baseball, football and basketball dominated the postwar years; it wasn’t until the North American Soccer League kicked off in ’68 – and the New York Cosmos glowed with stars like Brazil’s Pele and Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer – that the sport surged back to life nationally. Paul Crowder and John Dower tell the compelling story of the meteoric rise of the Cosmos – and U.S. soccer – in their new documentary, “Once in a Lifetime,” set to premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival this week. It is just one of a notable spate of soccer films sweeping the German capital ahead of this summer’s World Cup. “There was no other team in the world like the New York Cosmos,” says Crowder, a Londoner living in Los Angeles. “Now the stories are coming out.”