‍ WRITER’S NOTE

What does it cost to make yourself invisible for eight years, and what does it cost to finally be seen?

I came to this country from Cuba with my parents when I was two years old, in the sixties. I grew up in a Miami Beach that doesn't exist anymore, sleepy, ordinary, years before anyone thought to call it glamorous. The city ran a network of neighborhood parks back then, and you were assigned to yours by your address, no tryouts, no cuts. Whatever the season, the park had a sport waiting for you: basketball, flag football, softball. I played all of it, outside, from the time I could walk until I was fourteen. It was a wonderful childhood in a wonderful place, and none of it included soccer. I never played the sport this film is built around.

I say that because I want to be honest about what this script is and isn't. I made almost the identical crossing Andi did, at nearly the same age, on the losing end of the same word, immigrant. What I didn't inherit was her family's fear. Nobody in my house needed me to disappear. A neighborhood took me in through a park system built to notice every kid on its rolls, not overlook them. Andi doesn't get that. She gets a scrappy, underfunded club that loves her exactly as much as my parks loved me, on a field with a net still missing its top corner, and it becomes the one place in her life where being watched isn't a danger. Everywhere else, for eight years, she has wanted the one thing those free neighborhood parks handed me without my ever asking: to be counted, on a roster, without it costing her everything.

Andi Molina is the best goalkeeper her club has ever had, and she has worn long sleeves in ninety four degree heat since she was nine, so nobody looks too closely at her arms. A false phone number handed to a scout. Skipped class photos. A faked ankle injury to dodge a compliance check. She has been careful every day of her life, except in goal, where for ninety minutes at a time she has always let the whole world watch her. A clean sheet is a soccer term, a shutout, a perfect, empty record. It is also the exact thing she has spent her life trying to keep of herself on paper. The night she finally earns both, a national championship and a spotless record, those two meanings collide, and the sheet does not stay clean.

I keep writing versions of the same question: what a person, or a family, decides is worth being seen for, and what of them survives once that choice is made. My own childhood gave me a neighborhood for free. This is the story of a family that built one for Andi out of nothing, in secret, for seventeen years, and what it costs everyone in it when secrecy finally has to become something else.

— Leonard Tachmes, M.D.