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Leaving behind dusty workers' camps for gleaming soccer
stadiums, dozens of migrant laborers compete in a football
tournament of their own.
A workers' cup, staged each year in Doha by the organizers of
the 2022 competition, brings together teams representing local
construction firms. They play for cash prizes in the vast
stadiums many of them helped build.
The documentary - called "The Workers Cup" and launched at the
Sundance film festival in the U.S. state of Utah last week -
focuses on the hard lives of a 21-year-old Ghanaian worker,
Kenneth, and his Indian, Kenyan and Nepali teammates.
Conditions for the 1.6 million mainly Asian workers in Qatar
have come under sharp scrutiny from rights groups who say
migrants live in squalor and work without proper access to water
and shelter.
On Friday, a British man fell to his death while working at
Doha's Khalifa International Stadium - an incident Qatar's World
Cup organizing body said it was investigating.
It was the third death on a World Cup site in the last year.
The Gulf Arab kingdom denies abusing workers and says it is
implementing labor reforms.
In the film, Kenneth grapples with his fading ambitions of
becoming a professional footballer, returning from scoring goals
at matches watched by hundreds to his low-paid job on a
construction site and a cramped room in a desert labor camp.
His teammates include Paul, a Kenyan frustrated by not being
able to interact with the opposite sex, Padam, a Nepali office
worker struggling to maintain a long-distance relationship, and
Umesh, an Indian father of two children named after Manchester
United players and who hopes to save enough to build his family
a home.
Many of the men say they signed contracts under false pretenses
from recruiters in their home countries and now work long hours
for scant salaries.
"The life that I'm living here - I try to hide it from my
friends back home because they wouldn't understand it," says
Paul, who left a job as a bartender in Kenya's Westgate Mall
after it was attacked by gunmen in 2013 to travel to Qatar.
"But the life that I'm living here, it's a different life man.
It's like you're trapped or something," he says.
The players forget their dejection - if only temporarily - as
they sail to victory in several matches, winning the applause of
their peers before losing in the semi-finals and returning to
building - not playing in - Qatar's World Cup stadiums.
(Editing by Noah Browning/Jeremy Gaunt)
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