Joe Moser
This Thursday, Feb. 19, the Savoy Theater will be offering a double feature of “La Liga” and “Braiding a New Life,” both part of the Vermont Production Collective (VPC) new series VPC Presents: Vermont Films Showcase.
The series, curated by local filmmaker Chad Ervin (“Gone Guys,” VPC co-founder), will exhibit “powerful, Vermont-made cinema that showcases the diversity of homegrown filmmaking talent, supports local theaters, and sparks essential community conversations,” according to a VPC press release.
In anticipation of the special event, we are re-publishing a Sept. 2025 review of “La Liga” here.
Running a brisk 25 minutes, the documentary “La Liga” fulfills two purposes: attesting to how sport can foster community, and spotlighting the activism of immigrant farmworkers. The latter aim is the primary one, however. While the film offers compelling images of soccer heroics, it mainly focuses on economic struggle. The documentary stands as a poignant plea for justice and dignity for the workers who keep Vermont’s dairy industry thriving.
A winner of the Audience Choice Award and the Thaddeus Stevens Award at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, “La Liga” was created by filmmakers MacPherson Christopher and Paul Rosenfeld.
One farmworker featured in the film cogently addresses the ignorance and hypocrisy of Americans who harbor anti-immigrant views but consume staple foods yielded by the labor of immigrants: “Milk, onions, tomatoes. They don’t know that all these products go through immigrant hands.”
Vermont workers like him feel exploited and marginalized, according to the film, but they also find solace in an immigrant soccer league that “distracts” them from their harsh everyday lives and nurtures friendships and solidarity. That sense of shared struggle has led many of them to join the Milk with Dignity campaign, which persuaded Ben and Jerry’s to meet their demands in 2018 and which, in recent years, has focused on pressuring Hannaford supermarkets to likewise agree to specific standards to protect farmworkers’ rights.
For good and ill, the documentary wears its politics on its sleeve and presents no credible dissenting voices. In the opening sequence, police officers and border patrol agents use epithets to refer to immigrants during traffic stops, and later, immigrant farmworkers give unsettling accounts of abuse by their employers. In the end credits, the filmmakers’ first special thanks go to the organization Migrant Justice.
As a short film, “La Liga” could not possibly offer the nuance of more in-depth works about the plight of immigrants and migrants, such as Luis Alberto Urrea’s books of nonfiction and fiction and the feature films “Alambrista!” and “Green Border.” Nonetheless, it may have been possible to slightly humanize the adversaries of the farmworkers by portraying some of them as decent people working on behalf of a deeply flawed system.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that “La Liga” culminates in a soccer tournament and political demonstration held on the same day. The tournament involves both male and female soccer teams, and once the matches are over, the farmworker players and spectators turn their attention to staging a protest outside a Hannaford supermarket. As they’ve done many times before, they are applying pressure on the company to join the Milk with Dignity program and support workers’ rights. Tying the sport and the campaign together, a speaker tells the demonstrators, “All of us are here as a community united against the same rival, knowing that sooner or later we will score our goal.”
“La Liga” effectively casts light on the people who do essential work but live at the margins of our communities.
One farmworker in the film describes their existence as “hidden behind the farms,” and another declares that “it’s so important that we let ourselves be seen.” The interview subjects in the documentary are never named, a wise choice on the part of the filmmakers. Yet because those in the film bravely speak up, the least we can do is hear their voices, acknowledge what they contribute, and recognize their humanity.
