Get Ready, Harry Potter Fans! Documentary About Real-Life Quidditch Teams Coming This Fall
Most of us Muggles have yet to figure out how to fly on brooms, but that hasn’t stopped the players on the real-life quidditch league teams. A new documentary called Mudbloods is now set to hit select theaters and VOD in October and will shine a light on the athletes who’ve taken J.K. Rowling’s fictional, flying wizarding game from the Harry Potter universe and turned it into an actual sports league. Started in 2005 by students at Middlebury College in Vermont, real-world quidditch has since taken off like a Nimbus 2000 — this year’s world cup in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, featured 80 teams from around the world.
Mudbloods follows the fledgling squad from UCLA as they travel to New York in 2011 seeking glory at the fifth annual Quidditch World Cup. The Kickstarter-funded project was directed by Farzad Sangari who stumbled on a team practice one day when he was still a film student and was naturally intrigued by the sight of college kids running around with broomsticks between their legs. The official rules of Quidditch were adapted directly from the Potter novels — minus the magic of course — and players describe gameplay as a mix of “water polo, rugby, and dodgeball." Needless to say, teams take matches far more seriously than Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson did in The Internship. As Sangari told the Daily Bruin last year, “It takes such tenacity and passion and creativity to make something that literally should not be real into something that a lot of people do and a lot of people watch.”
Photo credit: Mudbloods Documentary, Warner Bros.
