Kathy Levitt

In the 1970s the North American Soccer League marked the first attempt to introduce soccer to American sports fans. While most teams had only limited success at best, one managed to break through to genuine mainstream popularity - the New York Cosmos. The brainchild of Steve Ross (Major executive at Warner Communications) and the Ertegun brothers (Founders of Atlantic Records), the Cosmos got off to a rocky start in 1971, but things changed in 1975 when the world's most celebrated soccer star, the Brazilian champion Pele, signed with the Cosmos for a five-million-dollar payday. With the arrival of Pele, the Cosmos became a hit and the players became the toast of the town, earning their own private table at Studio 54. A number of other international soccer stars were soon lured to the Cosmos, including Franz Beckenbauer, Rodney Marsh, and Carlos Alberto, but with the turn of the decade, the team began losing favor with fans and folded in 1985.

Made jointly by the Women’s Film Workshop and some of the inmates of the California Institution for Women, this is a moving analysis of why the women are in prison, what’s happening to them, what’s to become of them. It begins and ends with film taken outside the walls, while the rest is videotape transferred to film of the prisoners talking about race, sex and religion, class, economics and drugs. Occasionally statistics are inserted, but generally the women show such a degree of articulacy and radical thought that what they have to say is explanation enough. A remarkably undated combination of political anger and collective tenderness.