The underdog soccer comedy’s real-life characters team coach Thomas Rogen and Jaiyah Saelua, the first transgender football player in a FIFA World Cup qualifying match, basked in applause from the TIFF audience.
Waititi also brought on stage the gruff Dutch soccer coach Rongen, who is played by Michael Fassbender in, and who at a low point in his life ended up saving his career by coaching the losing American Samoan team.
“You spun my head around a few times in this film,” Rongen told Waititi about Fassbender’s portrayal in, which was only loosely based on the Dutch coach in real life. Based on a 2014 British documentary of the same name from Mike Brett and Steve Jamison, follows the national football team of American Samoa and their coach as they try to transform from perennial losers into a FIFA World Cup-qualifying outfit.
Waititi explained he was motivated to dramatize the story of the worst soccer team imaginable in American Samoa after watching the 2014 documentary. “I couldn’t believe it was a true story and I had to tell it and twist that truth,” the Maori filmmaker from New Zealand said with his trademark subversive humor that endeared him to the Toronto audience.also allowed him to continue to bring indigenous stories and voices to the big screen to encourage diversity and inclusion.
Waititi stressed his latest movie had to be authentic, including representing Jaiyah as a Fa’afafine, which in American Samoan culture are people who have fluid genders that move between the male and female worlds, and illustrate how two spirits can exist in one person.underlined how the Fa’afafine are common and treated as a normal part of the American Samoan culture.