SOUTH BRONX, NY — Last Saturday I had the opportunity to attend the premier of the documentary, LUCHA: A WRESTLING TALE at the NYC Documentary Film Festival. A ten-year project depicting the reality of a girls wrestling team at Taft High School in the South Bronx. The film was a tearjerker, motivational, and sometimes funny reality looking into the formation of this girls wrestling team. To me it was a combination of watching a version of the comedy come from behind little league baseball film, The Bad News Bears and Rocky, the motivational boxing film of another underdog that reached championship status. The documentary showed us many of the problems of the South Bronx through the lives of many of the girls in the team.
I have been Living in the South Bronx practically all my life (let’s say at least six plus decades) you can say I know a thing, or two about many of the problems confronting our community. Problems that show up in many of the statistics like the Bronx being the unhealthiest of the sixty-two counties in New York State. If that’s bad, what’s worst is that it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
Image Credit: IMDb
The South Bronx is also known as the poorest urban congressional district in the country. A title that also has been tagged on the South Bronx 15th Congressional District for decades. However, all the indicators depicting many of the problems of the South Bronx that appear on stats sheets and reports don’t really depict the reality of what poverty, or homelessness is about. That’s why this documentary of the girls wrestling team at Taft High School really touched me in many ways because it touched that nerve on many of the problems of the South Bronx in one swoop. The young ladies in the wrestling team should all win Oscars not for acting, but for playing themselves and making the audience understand their lives from the outside looking in. Congratulations to all of them for their great achievement against many obstacles that somehow, they learned to overcome and learn lessons of life through their hard training and competitive matches.
Many of the girls, now grown women expressed themselves at the question-and-answer period after the showing and they all validated the love they had for the program, and the two teachers/coaches that were there for them, during thick and thin. Robert Carrillo and Josh Lee who should also win academy awards not just for co-producing this great documentary, but also for being two visionaries that created a girls wrestling team ten years ago in a school with little to no resources against many naysayers and during their tenure bring a girls wrestling trophy to a school that has only had boys, majority track trophies on its school display since the 1940’s. Robert and Josh you both proved that with love and tenacity the South Bronx was able to develop a wholistic girls wrestling program that made a difference in so many of these young girls lives.
LUCHA: A WRESTLING TALE should be required viewing to every teacher, every junior and high school student and perhaps be a blueprint for other wrestling teams in other schools throughout the city and in other urban communities with many of the same conditions of poverty.
LUCHA: A WRESTLING TALE should also be viewed by every elected official who professes to represent his, or her minority poor district, but might not see the problems of poverty as clearly shown in this documentary.
Special congratulations to the film’s director Marco Ricci who saw a story in a South Bronx High School that needed to be told and shared.
Note: Since the premier the film has been selected as the Metropolis Grand Jury Prize Winner
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