Sporting voices from the margins: Vikash Dhorasoo and Fred Poulet’s Substitute (2007)

Within documentaries and biographies of sports people, there is often a tendency to focus on victories and the highs enjoyed during a career. However, this paper will focus on a cinematically-released sports documentary that is distinctly melancholic in tone.
Vikash Dhorasoo and Fred Poulet’s 2007 film Substitute chronicles Dhorasoo’s feelings of isolation and frustration at being a largely peripheral member of French squad at the 2006 Men’s Football World Cup in Germany. This work is significant on a variety of levels, notably because it involves a sports star as protagonist, co-director, and cameraman. In other words, Dhorasoo is involved in the production of the film and not merely someone is filmed and then situated within a narrative structure created by others.
Substitute is quite experimental in nature, being composed of grainy footage shot using a Super-8 camera that was unable to record sound. Consequently, the voice of Dhorasoo was added at the montage stage. This means that the film is thus involves quite a different method of production, tone and style compared to Stéphane Meunier’s much celebrated feature length television documentary Les Yeux dans les Bleus, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about France’s victory in the 1998 Men’s Football World Cup.
By comparing Substitute to contemporaneous French sports documentaries, this paper will analyse matters such as individuals and teams, notions of victory and defeat, and differing means of filming major sports events. It will pay particular attention to ways in which athletes’ voices emerge within such films.