The Second Game

Cinema doesn’t get much more minimalist—or more casually inventive—than this unique experimental documentary from Corneliu Porumboiu, which consists solely of a videotape of a snowy 1988 Bucharest soccer game accompanied by the commentary of the director and his father, who refereed the match. The setup is deceptively simple, but the behind-the-scenes circumstances were certainly not: the game was a showdown between one team managed by the Romanian army and another by the secret police, with corruption and threats against Porumboiu senior lending the match a surprising political significance. The verbal back-and-forth between father and son offers by turns penetrating and puckish insight not just into the on-field play but a complex historical moment.