Diamond drama

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck on their sweet, humanist baseball story Sugar

FAR FROM HOME: Algenis Perez Soto

With 2006’s Half Nelson, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck established themselves as a proudly liberal, humanist-leaning filmmaking team, and their latest, Sugar, which they co-wrote and directed, is in much the same vein. It’s a drama about illegal immigration, baseball and the American way that’s sweet, subtle and generous with its characters.

Newcomer Algenis Perez Soto plays Miguel “Sugar” Santos, a talented pitcher from the Dominican Republic, where Major League teams run academies that filter talent up into the minors and, in a tiny percentage of cases, into “The Show” itself. In the relatively impoverished country, baseball is one of the only forms of rapid economic advancement, and so plenty is riding on the players as they try to make it in the big leagues.

Sugar makes it up the ladder, sent to Iowa to play on a farm team. But barely speaking English, not quite a breakout star, his future seems uncertain.

Fleck and Boden sat down with the Mirror at the last Toronto International Film Festival to talk about the movie. Of its genesis, Fleck says, “I’m a big baseball fan, so I thought I knew a lot about the game, but I didn’t know that every Major League team has an academy in the Dominican Republic where they sign players for cheap, in the hopes that they come here to become big stars. But we were interested in the guys that go through that process that you never hear of, what it’s like for them.”

They did their homework; both say that intensive research was a big part of developing the film. “We went down to the Dominican Republic several times and visited a dozen of these camps and talked to players who were in the camps, former players and people who kind of worked around the baseball industry,” says Boden. “We did the same thing in the Midwest, where they have the single A in the United States and the same thing in the Bronx, in New York, where a huge community of former professional baseball players still live and still play pick-up games on the weekends. From there, we kind of developed the idea of the character and his journey, what his arc was.”

“A lot of these academies are run by former Dominican Major League baseball players, who really advocate for giving more education to the players they sign and giving them more support once they come to the United States,” says Boden. “That’s a really important thing to realize—they’re real people who are actually good and who really care who are trying to do these things, but at the same time, we have to recognize that there’s a social cost involved in just the existence of this machine.”

In a move that’s sure to raise some ire in the U.S., the two have made a film set in the States that’s almost entirely in Spanish. This was a crucial point for Boden: “So much of his journey in the sense of his isolation is dependent on language that it wasn’t really an option to have it start out with them all speaking English with Dominican accents in the Dominican Republic, and then he comes here and is like, ‘What, I don’t know how to order breakfast!’ when we just saw him speaking English for the first third of the movie!”

SUGAR OPENS THIS FRIDAY, APRIL 24