AFRICAN DREAM

Documentary about Sepp Blatter and the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa
The Story of the 2010 Football World Cup

Length: 48 Minutes Medium: HD – Convertable in all Formats Production: Adrian Arnold - den Hartogh Productions AG Ready for Broadcast: From April 2010 ready for Shipping Languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese. Also available as IT version.

The Story
The story begins in 1975. The then 35-year-old manager Blatter is the first European to organize a football tournament in Africa. For Coca Cola he invites young Africans to the event. One year later hundreds of thousands of Black people demonstrate for their rights on the streets of Soweto near Johannesburg. The uprising is brutally crushed. It marks the beginning of the end of the apartheid era. 35 years later a Black president is heading the country and former ANC activists are organizing the biggest sports event in the world...an event that Sepp Blatter brought for them to South Africa.

The Concept
African Dream tells the story of Sepp Blatter’s dream of organizing the first football world championship in Africa. And the dream of the Black population in South Africa to finally receive recognition through the 2010 World Cup.

We go back to Sepp Blatter’s roots, to where he grew up. We accompany Blatter to the Sepp Blatter Tournament in the Swiss canton of Valais (with statements from Platini & Beckenbauer) and to a celebration with his old friends. We show where this man comes from.

We’re at the FIFA Palace in Zürich where Blatter painstakingly plans the gigantic event and where he receives African heads of state. We show Blatter on a journey to Africa a year before the championship - here we speak to adults and children from the townships about football.

The Filming
For this documentary a Dutch-Swiss film team researched the partly controversial career of Sepp Blatter, accompanied the FIFA president over the course of two years, spoke with South African president Jacob Zuma and for several weeks questioned eye-witnesses in Soweto on the past and present.

The Post Production
The HD produced film has a length of 48 minutes and can be converted into all television formats. April 2010, the film will be ready for broadcast