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“Your sport is a political utopia,” Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu tells his friend, Laurențiu Ginghină. Ever since he got injured in his youth and can’t play, Ginghină dreams of minimizing soccer’s strain on players. In all of Porumboiu’s work, existential questions simmer beneath the surface. His intuitive, conversational and witty portrait of his friend leads us into similarly loaded territory: Glimpses of post-communist Romania, European Union spleen and America’s dim capitalist mirage mix with one man’s impossible pursuit to revolutionize his beloved sport. And yet Ginghină’s attempts prove illusive. In one scene, as he carefully outlines the rules and logic of his experiment, he notes a paradox: He wishes the ball to be free, always in motion, but he has made it static. Porumboiu thus captures the contradictions and follies that prevent us from finding better, more just solutions, in spite of humanity’s inherent utopian bend. The only consolation may be cinema itself: Ginghină has failed to make his sport a commercial success, but as he sits at his desk, an ordinary bureaucrat at his day job, he feels like Superman. Thanks to his convictions, he leads a double life. (Ela Bittencourt)