Playoff

Max Stoller, 42 has achieved the impossible. Thirty years after surviving the Holocaust, he has taken Europe by storm as the coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv, the new European basketball champions. One phone call will change his life forever. It is from Germany. And the offer is to return to Germany after all these years and coach the German National team. Everybody believes that Max, with his strong sense of family history, will reject this astonishing offer. Despite the public outrage in Israel, however, and despite his mother, who sees it as an act of betrayal, he accepts and goes back to Frankfurt, the city where his father was taken away by the Gestapo. Once in Germany he is drawn to the area where he lived as a child. There he finds himself attracted to Deniz, a young Turkish woman, lost in a new life in a new country, along with her 13-year-old daughter. While helping Deniz to find her husband, Max digs in to his own past and discovers new facts about family history. He realizes that his life has been based in part on betrayal and desires, nothing heroic, nothing symbolic. His success and outward complacency always masked the fact that he felt dislocated from the world, unable to enjoy the fruits of his hard work. While facing a stubborn team and trying to take them from rags to riches, Max slowly understands that he has to smash the symbols of the past. And the first symbol is his own. And so, facing the past, perhaps understanding it better, he becomes a new symbol of his own personal victory. —Montreal Film Festival