PARK CITY (Utah, US): Director Adam Sobel never intended to end up in Qatar, but it was 2010, jobs were scarce in the US and his longtime girlfriend now his wife had just been offered a job teaching at a Northwestern University Qatar. So they went.

While there, Sobel found work with a local production company that did news stories and documentaries for outlets like BBC, CNN, and HBO. One particular story was requested frequently: That of the migrant workers who were building the facilities for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. He didn’t know it at the time, but the assignment would ultimately provide the foundation for his documentary, “The Workers Cup,” which premiered on Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Because the subject is so sensitive and because media restrictions were so significant, we either had to hide people’s identities or work undercover. The human touch was lost,” Sobel said. “We wanted to do something that went much deeper than that and really honoured the workers for their sacrifices and their hopes and their dreams rather than doing something that just saw them as victims ... I wanted to build empathy for the workers instead of sympathy.” The film centres on the multinational men, from Kenya, Ghana, India and the Philippines, who have given their lives over to slavery-like contracts and dangerous conditions to build the stadiums from the ground up. One man, Kenneth, who was a soccer player in Ghana, shares his story about how a recruiter had told him that if he came to Qatar, he’d get a club soccer contract.

Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2017