Honduras isn’t especially known for its standout fútbol team, nor is it exactly a shining star in the world of Central American cinema. But who can blame them? Between production and exhibition, filmmaking requires an inhuman amount of money and infrastructure, which means many smaller countries often can’t manage to keep up.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t a generation of young camera-slingers eager to share their version of Honduras with their fellow catrachos and the world at large. And thanks to this new-fangled contraption called the internet, they’ve been able to bypass the traditional gatekeepers to bring their vision directly to anyone with a with a decent internet connection and an open mind. The result is the fútbol-themed webseries Gol Peleado, directed by Carlos Toledo and presented on the country’s ambitious new web content platform 2que3.
Gol Peleado follows the misadventures of a middle-class couch potato named Gabriel, who meets his dream girl and invents a story about leading the neighborhood’s star soccer team in a clumsy attempt to impress her. When she takes him at his word, our hero must assemble a ragtag team of unathletic gamers and math nerds and turn them into a championship selection. Along the way, the crew dreams up a few tricks to skew things in their favor, until their schemes are discovered by Gabriel’s tough-guy older brother.
Gol Peleado is impressively shot, with solid camerawork and generally decent acting. Clocking in at six-minutes an episode, the chapters do begin to drag a bit, something that could be fixed with some more agile cutting and a generally faster pace to the acting. Flaws aside, Gol Peleado is a commendable effort and hopefully spells the beginning of a digital content revolution for a country too often associated exclusively with violence and poverty. Check out episode one below.