Published on Apr 16, 2017: “Documentary which follows events at Israel’s most notorious football club. Beitar Jerusalem FC is the most popular team in Israel and the only club in the Premier League never to sign an Arab player. Midway through a season the club’s owner, Russian-Israeli oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak, brought in two Muslim players from Chechnya in a secretive transfer deal that triggered the most racist campaign in Israeli sport and sent the club spiraling out of control.
Forever Pure follows the famous football club through the tumultuous season, as power, money and politics fuel a crisis and shows how racism is destroying both the team and society from within.”
In 2008, Russian oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak was hoping to become the new mayor of Jerusalem. His ownership of Beitar, secured a few years earlier, could potentially have been used as a campaigning tool but Gaydamak finally received just a few percent of the votes. Zinshtein’s on-camera interviews with the oligarch, who barely seems to speak any Hebrew, are chilling to behold, as the man has no problems in admitting what his plans were.
What is less directly addressed, but nonetheless suggested through the expert editing credited to Justine Wright and Noam Amit, is how the owner’s political defeat is related to his decision to bring on board to young Chechen players for the 2012-13 season. Foreign players aren’t unusual in Israeli soccer — and indeed Beitar already had a player from Latin America — but Gaydamak’s unexpected move was a shock for the core group of Beitar fans, known as the Familia. They pride themselves on the fact that their club is the only national soccer team that has never signed an Arab player — the film’s title is their proud chant that underlines the club’s “racial purity” — and they are now confronted with not one but two Muslim players at once. A form of revenge? Possibly. A way to thoroughly agitate Israeli sports and society at large? Certainly.
Zinshtein’s film intelligently dissects the many contradictions at play here, starting with the fact that it is absolutely shocking that Israelis, just a couple of generations after the Holocaust, want to pride themselves on any kind of racial purity to the explicit exclusion of others. The way in which different things get conflated — “Muslim” and “Arab” are two distinctly different things and Chechens are Muslims but definitely not Arabs — so they can be boiled down into angry and hateful rallying cries is a tragic and recurring theme.
It is shocking to see how the core group of supporters manages to turn the legions of fans against the club they profess to love so much. And all this only because of the arrival of two largely innocent pawns, 19-year-old Dzhabrail Kadiyev and 23-year-old Zaur Sadayev, the devoutly religious Chechen players who clearly had no clue what they were in for. (One of the film’s best scenes shows them holed up in their hotel room, like caged animals unable to understand what’s going on around them.)
The supporters’ loudly voiced anger and incitements to hatred finally result not only in practically empty stadiums but also physical threats and completely demotivated players.
When Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire owner of the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem, known for being the only team in the league without Arab players, hires two Chechen Muslims in the middle of the 2012-’13 season, it sparks a catastrophic battle between the team leadership and its right-wing, extreme nationalist fan base. Granted amazing access to all parties in the story, producer-director Maya Zinshtein, a Russian-born investigative journalist, smartly places her shocking portrait of a team and its fans in a broader sociopolitical context, allowing it to surpass its token subject matter and explore issues such as racism and mob rule. Indeed, it provides a cautionary tale for countries like the U.S., where politicians have failed to thoroughly condemn hate speech. Loaded with stranger-than-fiction incident, this documentary should find robust festival play before seguing into international broadcast.
Zinshtein opens with a brief history of the team, founded in 1936 and one of the Israel Premier League’s most controversial because of its multitude of outspoken fans who provide the players with plenty of love, but who also incur penalties for the team because of their bad behavior in the stands. Traditionally the team of choice for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and Jews descended from communities in the Middle East, it is also known for a supporter’s group called La Familia that took over the eastern bleachers in Beitar’s Teddy Stadium back in 2005 and became notorious for chants that insult Arab players. The film’s title, “Forever Pure,” comes from a logo on one of their banners…
The members of La Familia take pride in being the most racist fans in the league and are able to instigate a boycott of the stadium. Certainly their absence seems preferable to their return when they boo their own team, fight with its new players, and threaten to kill the chairman.
