Synopsis
Whatever direction you try to approach FCXB vs. Godzilla from, the film resists classification, because the match is already being played, captured in the speed of the moment, and the bodies on the pitch are in constant motion. They escape interpretation just as they dodge the blows of the other players, precisely because these bodies cannot be contained. The film adopts an aesthetic at the intersection of video games, post-internet art, sports commentary and horror cinema, without fitting neatly into any of these categories. On the contrary, it brings them together to better deconstruct them.
Structured like a football match, the project shifts the focus to the collective, bringing together friends to tell their own stories, constantly juggling personal narratives and fiction, game and reality. Through an interface inspired by video games, giving access to the avatars’ stories, the characters are presented through queer self-parody, at the very heart of the camp aesthetic, often the only way to bring out representations usually excluded from the story.
In this way, we see a shift away from the classic paradigm of football as a competitive game between two teams, generating capital and operating within a patriarchal and heteronormative system that normalises, and also away from football in Romania as an arena for far-right propaganda. Here, all that is called into question, and football is reappropriated through a strong camp dimension, inextricably linked to a political dimension. The violence appears merely as an irony of the absurdity of violence in sport in general; theatricality becomes a tool of resistance in the face of normativity, and the logic of “may the best man win” disappears, because no one emerges victorious from a match whose objective is to play and be together, among friends.
The football match becomes a celebration of queerness, where bodies move freely in a claimed chaos, where the rules of the game are uncertain, the boundaries of the field unstable and the identities of the characters indeterminate. And in all this disorder, just when things seem to make sense, if only for a moment, everything is brutally pulverised by the appearance of a giant Godzilla.
— Adnana Greșiță
