Description
Tatami is a stylish black-and-white political thriller.
Freedom or death, betrayal or victory.
Leila is competing in the World Judo Championships and is ready to step onto the tatami, where nothing will stop her from winning. Except, perhaps, the government of her home country, which orders her to fake an injury and throw the match.
Thanks to Tatami, I finally have an excuse to speak my mind. Let’s tear this whole sports machine to shreds. Watch out, sports, it’s gonna hurt.
I am a fierce opponent of sports. Let me emphasize: sports, not physical fitness. Physical fitness is undoubtedly beneficial. Even a daily walk of 8,000 steps is great. But competitive sports have never brought anything good, especially to the athletes themselves. It’s been this way for hundreds, even thousands of years.
Injuries, psychological pressure, humiliation… It’s an entire industry of broken lives and shattered dreams. Whose dreams? The athletes? Their parents? Or maybe the coaches? Some parents try to live vicariously through their kids because they screwed up their own lives and never achieved success. Coaches have their own agendas, and none of them are in the athlete’s best interest.
We are always shown the glossy picture and the success stories of a select few athletes. Let’s say there are a hundred of them. But we are never told what happened to the thousands and tens of thousands of others who didn’t make it to the Olympics or any major championship. Thousands of people train just to make it into the top ten. And in that top ten, the competition is so fierce that only one can survive.
Decades of injuries, humiliation, and grueling training—and then what? Oblivion or a wheelchair? How often do they tell the stories of those who got injured at a World Championship or the Olympics and ended up as unwanted invalids, confined to a hospital bed for the rest of their lives?
Modern sports are just political intrigues where scientific laboratories compete, and the athletes are their guinea pigs. Which is exactly what the film Tatami proves once again.
P.S.
I didn’t do any research while writing this. This is just my amateur take on the world of sports. I might be wrong about some things, but this is how I see it.
