Documentary: I Bleed Black

The documentary I decided to talk about today is called I Bleed Black, a film that follows the University of California-Santa Barbara Ultimate team in their quest to win a national championship. UCSB is the most successful college Ultimate team in history, performing a three-peat in 1988, '89 and '90 and again in '96, '97, and '98 with multiple finals appearances. This documentary follows them in 2000-2001 from tryouts to the end of the season.



In following the team, the filmmakers manage to capture a significant amount of emotion by focusing on the small core of veterans that make the team's big decisions. Although it's always hard to discuss how "truthful" the emotions and behavior of documentary actually are, the team is fairly invested their team. They never address the cameras, and although the speeches in the huddle are sometimes a little overly epic it all feels natural.

The team is full of characters, and there are easy sub-plots to follow during the team's efforts. There's a nice balance of off- and on-field coverage, with the on-field coverage especially doing a nice job of highlighting the sport's strengths. As Ultimate is still a relatively unknown sport, the director accented it well, selling it as something worth fighting for and adding legitimacy to his work in the process.

I would recommend this to anyone to watch, partly because I want to introduce the sport to everyone but also because it holds its own as a story worth watching. Well-known sport or not, the struggle and triumph is real and it carries the film.