Foosers trailer captures madness and melodrama of foosball

Great Caeser’s ghost, who knew that the world of little wooden men and their tiny balls was so fucking intense? Not Hart Snider.

“I couldn’t believe how much drama was going on,” the local filmmaker tells the Straight, about the making of his foosball documentary, Foosers, “and how upset people were, and how emotional. In the beginning, I was just, like, ”˜this is just a game people play in bars.’”

Oh no it isn’t! Judging from the trailer for Snider and his partner David Shohet’s film–which went online today–you’d probably find less melodrama in a Tennessee Williams-scripted movie set in a bath house lost at sea during a full moon. Or something.

The filmmaking team has been toiling over Foosers for five years, ever since they first heard that 20 different countries were converging in Hamburg in 2006 for the first ever World Cup of Table Soccer. They decided to take a look into the Canadian team. What they found was total madness, evidently.

“The way film funding works in Canada you probably need at least six months to a year to get a budget,’ he says, “But we thought, ”˜If we don’t film this now, the story is going to be gone.’”

And so Snider and Shohet self-financed a shoot that went from Vancouver, to Squamish, Victoria, Montreal, and Hamburg. They're hoping to have it finished in the next few months.

Snider says that the broiling team-leadership politics we see in the teaser is only one of the film’s histrionic narrative strands. For instance, there is apparently some controversy over the various tables in use from one region to another. For your information, the preferred North American platform is known as the Tornado.

If it all seems a little insane, Snider points out that dedicated and genuinely skilled foosball players pursue their passion at huge personal cost-something most of us do in one way or another.

“At their level they really do devote a lot of time to practicing and touring,” he says. “And you can’t make a living doing it. They have to devote a lot of their personal time to traveling, just to play at the elite level.”

He adds, “I saw this similarity between what they were doing, and what we’re doing as indie filmmakers.”