2023-05-07 13:26:07
Unknown in Polish is ‘nieznany’. This is the original title of the documentary film dedicated to the current center forward of FC Barcelona, ’Lewandowski-Unknown‘. because it is a approach to the footballer, of course, but also to the person in their privacy, away from the spotlight, the grass of the stadiums and the admiration or rejection of the fans. The film was presented yesterday at the Tactical festivaldedicated to soccer documentaries, and will be available on Prime Video starting Monday, May 15.
This was the first public screening outside of Poland and according to the film’s producers, Sawicki and Galanty, it has been possible thanks to the willingness of the footballer and the large amount of material collected –essentially family films– that he himself Robert Lewandowski, born in 1988, had forgotten. “He is very shy and he was a bit scared when we started filming, but little by little he let go,” the producers commented in the presentation.
The objective is to show the star from a more intimate point of view, which does not take away from perfectly documenting his career from Polish youth teams to his arrival at Barcelona the last summer. The first thing we see is a home recording of Christmas 1996, with Robert next to his father, excited about the gifts. At eight years old he was already kicking fields of land where grass only grew in summer. We are told of the initial difficulties. Lewandowski lacked muscle, explains defender Matts Hummels, a teammate at Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich. His legs were too skinny. In the footage of the time we see that his knees were actually larger than his thighs. Jürgen Klopp, his coach at Dortmund, explains that he had a lot of talent but was slow to take advantage of it.
The figure of Klopp, one of those who intervenes the most in the film, is important. Lewandowski lost his father when he was 15 years old. and, in a way, Klopp acted as a father figure some time later. Looking back, the footballer assures that during his time at Dortmund he lacked ego and, if he had had it, it would have helped him show a better version of himself.
Although he found it when he signed for the almighty Bayernteam with which he would achieve his only Champions League At the moment –in 2020, with no fans in the stadiums– every soccer fan remembers the four goals he scored against Real Madrid in the 2013 European semifinal. On the images of that match held in Dortmund, which ended with 4- 1, Lewandowski comments that when celebrating the third goal he felt a strained thigh, but decided to continue and ended up scoring a little more. Much worse had been years before, when he was a member of the Legia Warsaw branch, and he had an injury that kept him off the pitch for months.
Lewandowski’s world has revolved around sport. His father played judo and his mother played volleyball. his wife, Anna Lewandowska, has represented Poland in international karate. He himself has also played basketball, volleyball and table tennis, among other sports. One of the interviewed technicians assures that because of this his body is so resistant and he has hardly had any long-term injuries. And a psychologist carefully analyzes the reason for his reliability when taking penalties: he has the ability to isolate himself from everything at the time of execution.
Along with his evolution as a footballer, the disappointment with the Polish team in the 2018 World Cup –and how the fans and public opinion blamed him excessively for the debacle–, the call from Alex Ferguson interested in signing him for Manchester United before join Bayern, the feat of surpassing Gerd Müller as Bayern’s top scorer in a single season or the memory of the match against Wolfburg in which he scored five goals in just nine minutes –with ecstasy on the bench of his coach at the time, Pep Guardiola–, the documentary talks about how the death of his father, the abortion affected him natural that Anna had a few days after the start of Euro 2016, the clarity in her life that has given her the birth of his two daughters, the different processes of overcoming or the illusion that he saw from the first moment among the Barça fans, still not believing that more than 60,000 people attended his presentation. Jürgen Klopp, Xavi Hernández, Thiago Alcántara, Thierry Henry and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge are some of those interviewed along with Lewandowski, his wife, his mother and sister.
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