Red Army

The documentary is about the ice hockey team of the Soviet Union. For years it was counted the best in the world and the hockey it played resembled no other country's: built on passing, in constant motion, collective rather than individual. Behind it lay a system of training; the players spent most of the year in camps, could not see their families, and the coach had full authority. At the centre is Slava Fetisov: captain of the team, then the player who wanted to go to America and came into conflict with the state over it. Gabe Polsky directs. The documentary dates from 2014. Its main witness is Fetisov, who often answers the director curtly during the interviews; the documentary uses those moments without cutting them. The matter the narrative builds is the relation between sport and the state; the team was used as a political instrument through the cold war and the film shows that directly. The methods of the coach Viktor Tikhonov are its hardest section; the players describe him as the executor of a system. The first years of the players who moved to North America form a separate section and the difficulty of adjusting is given in detail. Archive footage is used heavily and the match recordings show directly why the play was different. Its limit is balance; the narrative leans on Fetisov's view and the opposing one gets little room. Who it is for: anyone curious about sports documentary and cold war history. Who it is not for: the names blur for anyone who does not follow hockey, and the narrative rests on a single source.