Lewiston High School soccer coach Mike McGraw is pulled into a group photo by Mohamed Khalid in the lobby of The Dolard and Priscilla Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston in April 2016 during a showing of the documentary “One Team,” about the school’s soccer team and its run to a state title in 2015.
Who says you can’t go home?
After two years of editing, re-working — and, well, life — the film “One Team: The Story of the Lewiston High School Blue Devils” will debut its finished product Thursday. A “director’s cut” debuted two years ago, at the city’s Emerge Film Festival in 2016.
This time, the film’s first stateside screening premiere will take place at the most fitting of places — Lewiston High School.
“I really wanted to show it again before we started exploring various other routes that we wanted to take with it — routes that we’re exploring now,” director and filmmaker Ian Clough said. “Lewiston was an obvious choice. We initially thought about maybe renting out a movie theater, and then the idea came up — I think it was Jason Fuller that brought it up and said, ‘Why don’t we just do it at the high school?’ As soon as he said, that it just made all the sense.”
Fuller, the athletic director at the high school, said it was a combined idea from multiple people.
“I think it’s just a good venue to do it here because it’s at Lewiston High School, and the story’s about our kids and our staff, and the things the program’s been able to get done over the last couple years,” Fuller said.
Clough, a Lewiston High School graduate — and soccer player under coach Mike McGraw — followed the varsity boys’ soccer team during its 2015 season, specifically its playoff run. He had hoped to capture the 2014 season (“that was a really good team,” Clough said), but wasn’t able to make it happen.
“It kind of worked out,” Clough said, because the Blue Devils made it back to the state championship game in 2015 after falling short the previous year, and made amends by winning their first state title.
Clough got the idea to follow the team and make a movie while on vacation. He called Fuller up to get his blessing before getting on a flight back home.
“(I) said, ‘I want to follow Coach McGraw and team around through the playoffs,’ and that’s all it was going to be,” Clough said. “I remember after the first game we kind of realized right away that there was a bigger a story than just this playoff run. We kind of up and said, ‘let’s try to make a documentary.’ And even then, when we released the trailer, that first trailer, it really blew up quickly. And I don’t think any of us ever anticipated all the attention not just our film might get, but all the attention the school, the team and the community would get from it as well.”
The team, made up of players from a handful of different countries, and a culturally-changing community that supported it, has been documented since by more than just Clough and his crew. Local attention turned to statewide interest, and a national story blossomed. That caused Clough and his crew to re-work the movie. He called it “a pretty big change since the director’s cut.”
“Last fall, we really kind of rewrote the whole premise of the film,” Clough said. “It’s still a soccer-based movie. Obviously it’s still about the team. We just kind of restructured everything. And then this winter and early spring we started working on it, and I’d say we probably finished it up last week. We did all the audio touches, colored and music. Yeah, it was about last week we finished it.”
Clough admitted that the film is “a little more political at times,” something he initially tried to avoid, “but it’s hard to ignore what’s going on in the world today.”
Fuller, who saw the director’s cut two years ago, said “it’s going to be fun to see the final product now, and I know there’s people in the community that are really excited to see the final cut.”
As for Clough, he’s hoping the people most invested in the film — the team, McGraw and his staff, and others closely involved with the program — get the most enjoyment. For the former Blue Devil player, who was “instantly” accepted by the 2015 team while filming its season, nothing that happens after this in his filmmaking career will compare to “One Team.”
“No project will probably be as personal as this one,” Clough said. “Everything about the process was more fulfilling than I anticipated it to be.”
The movie will be shown twice Thursday, with showings at 5 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online through eventbrite.com, or at the door on the day of the premiere.
wkramlich@sunjournal.com
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