Film Screening – Hockey in my Blood (free entry)

Hockey in my Blood is a film about hockey in Coorg, told through the story of the Kodava Hockey Festival, the world’s largest hockey tournament played between the families of Coorg in the coffee hills of South India.

Kodavas, the people of Coorg are a martial-tribal community known for strong ties to land and family. Every year, Kodava players from over 200 families come together to play in their own hockey tournament – The Kodava Hockey Festival. There is no bar on age or gender. The only rule of forming a team is that all members must be from the same family.

Young boys and girls, fathers, uncles, mothers, professionals and even former Olympic heroes – are all players. With the families playing for bragging rights for the rest of the year, victories are hard fought and competition can get heated. At the end of the month-long event, there will be just one winning team but many winners – the sport and the sense of community not least among them. Welcome to The Kodava Hockey Festival!

Storyline

Using the final match of the 2013 tournament as its central narrative arc, the film moves back and forth between the match, stories of the players, and preparations of the mud ground, which is busily and painstakingly being transformed from rural hinterland to a professional hockey ground.

Over three months, the film travels to many parts of Coorg in a quest to understand ‘why hockey’ and ‘what a family tournament means to its people’. From individual players dribbling in the backyard of their coffee plantations to whole family teams practicing in local school grounds, we meet every kind of player. We meet amateurs like young Prajwal who thinks that like Team Australia in the Cricket World Cup, in Coorg Hockey his family team is the best, or 17-year-old Priya, who talks about how she was made the Captain the very first time she played because she was the only girl. We meet professionals and even former Olympians. They talk with nostalgia about their young days in Coorg, telling stories from the fields of Coorg, to playing for Team India. Common to every player is the sentiment that the love for the game is such that no matter where they are, every summer they go back to Coorg to play for the family.