IN SHORT
We've decided to make a documentary based on material filmed by the same film's charachters - sometimes maybe a bit trembling or shacking, but that becomes secondary in the context of the story - because this would have given us a film full of emotions and passions.
Its mix of action (trough soccer) and social themes let us talk, between the lines, of current topics like immigration and refugees from a distant (Africa, 15 years ago) and original point of view.

In the latest years we've all seen dozens of documentaries about refugees and refugee crisis.
Me too, I tought everything had already been said on this argument, so when I started working at the project - in early 2016 - I was attracted by its power and narrative potential but, for these reasons, I abandoned it for some months. But suddenly I found the key to tell this story, and it appeared to me as something unique, for two different reasons.
The first was the long and complex trajectory of the story, a narrative arc that covers almost 15 years and (quite a unique case!) is all well documented and filmed by his own characters. We had the exlusive to use more than 500 hours of video footage!
The second was the original, provocative approach used by Gabriel Stauring.
"Ok, refugee stories are sad, and people don't like sad stories, let's give them something different, something they can like". And he creates a football team made of refugees. At a first view, there could be something cinic and even wrong in all this thought, in this approach. But only at a first glance.
Gabriel doesn't want to hide the refugees behind the smiling faces of a football team.
If he's cinic, it's not towards the refugees, but towards football. He uses football to let people talk of the refugees, to let people view and know something they would never have explored and faced in their life: the inner life of a refugee camp, hunger, poverty, death.
The film starts from this points, and keeps them as focal points for its structure and narrative development.

I think it's important to have a documentary like this NOW because Gabriel and the guys of Darfur United have already walked a long path that will be faced in the next years by all the thousands of refugees that just came or are still coming to Euope, to the US, to Asia.
In other words, due to the long narrative arc, this film gives an occasion to "watch the future", to face the potential, the problems and the difficulties that we (as host countries) and the refugees will find in the years yet to come.

In large part, Not Just Football is a "found-footage" documentary, collecting images filmed by someone else in another part of the world.
As a filmmaker, I've found this unusual approach as the best way to create something intimate, something real. I could not ask to my characters "Do this, tell me that", I could just "create" the movie using images made by the film's characters, with their feelings, sensibility, emotion, so this "found-footage" gives a great power and richness to the whole story.
Of course, the documentary could not be finished without answering a question: where are these refugees now? Where and how do they live, what happened to them?
So, we've moved to Sweden to film two Darfur United players, Moubark and Ismail, who are (together with Gabriel and Mark, the coach) the film's main characters.
Their stories are still open, even today, 15 years after the first time Gabriel moved to Africa.
15 years of filming are not enough to close the personal stories of the film's characters, maybe because reality is an ongoing and never-ending process, and people (Gabriel, Mubark, Ismail...) will just continue evolving and slightly moving, like the continental drift.