espnW presents Heroics

Amanda Micheli is an Oscar-nominated director and a celebrated cinematographer whose work often focuses on female athletes. In her past life, she played on the U.S. women’s rugby team, before multiple ACL tears turned her focus from contact sports back to cinema.

Micheli directed, shot and edited her first film, JUST FOR THE RIDE, a documentary about cowgirls on the women's Pro Rodeo circuit. RIDE won an Academy Award and International Documentary Association Award in student categories and premiered on the prestigious PBS series "POV" in 1996. DOUBLE DARE, which followed the lives of two Hollywood stuntwomen, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the audience award at AFI FEST in Los Angeles and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among many others. It was broadcast on the PBS series "Independent Lens" in 2005 and had a limited theatrical and a broad DVD release. In 2008, she co-directed LA CORONA, which followed an unlikely beauty pageant in a Colombian women’s prison. LA CORONA was nominated for an Academy Award and premiered at Sundance before airing on HBO. The film is currently in development at Fox Searchlight for adaptation into a fiction feature.

In addition to directing her own projects, Micheli also collaborates with other filmmakers. She was a producer and the director of photography on Lauren Greenfield's award-winning HBO film, THIN, and shot the premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock's series, "30 Days." Also for HBO, she was a producer and D.P. on their top-rated documentary, CAT DANCERS, and supervising producer on BRAVE NEW VOICES, a series about teen poetry. Other D.P. credits include: MY FLESH AND BLOOD, a Sundance and Emmy Award-winning documentary (HBO), THE FLUTE PLAYER, an Emmy-nominated film shot in Cambodia (PBS) and WITCHES IN EXILE, which won the special jury prize at SXSW.

Micheli is represented for commercial work by Ridley and Tony Scott's company, RSA. She is based in San Francisco, grew up in Boston and is a graduate of Harvard University. See her work at runawayfilms.com.

When I got the opportunity to make a film for the HERoics series, my goal was to find an emotional women's soccer story within the U.S., ideally an unexpected story that would offer something different than a traditional national team player profile. My producer Shani and I started combing for stories, and we had some great leads, but it was very challenging to find something unique within our timeline.

Shani heard about a young woman named Priscilla Meza, who was a standout player from Watsonville, Calif. Priscilla was trying out for a spot on the Mexican national team, as she felt she never had a shot at the U.S. squad, and in fact she didn’t even have a green card for most of her life. Priscilla, like many young Latina women from Watsonville, had survived a harrowing childhood. Her story was amazing, but we were unsure how we would be able to film her while she was commuting back and forth to Mexico. When I met Priscilla, her coach invited another woman to join us for lunch, who he said was another notable player from the area with a powerful story; he had a feeling that she and I would hit it off. Gina Castaneda walked in, sat down, and I asked her what soccer meant to her. She said, quite forcefully and without hesitation, "Soccer saved my life." I got goosebumps. She then proceeded to tell me her life story, which was so moving and complicated, that afterwards, I called Shani from the car and said, "this Gina woman is great, but it's way too much for a short film. How could we possibly pack it all in to eight minutes?" So we kept looking.

But Gina stuck with me -- I just couldn’t shake her. Under the wire, we pitched her to ESPN and they went for it, and then the ride began. Trying to follow Gina with a camera is like trying to follow a high-speed car chase in a donkey cart; she doesn’t stop for anyone, and she's always doing at least 15 things at once. Her life story is so intense, her interview more than three hours. We were continually working to build relationships with the boys she coaches, which was sometimes challenging. The film was hard to make and, as we expected, even harder to fit into eight minutes -- but I knew it was an important story to tell.

Gina is a survivor, and she has truly captured a way to use sports for social change. She "could have been a contender" -- she might have been one of the first (or even the first?) Mexican-American woman to actually have a shot at the U.S. team. But it wasn't meant to be; a devastating knee injury (not to mention the fact that she was raising her younger sister at the time) kept her from chasing her dreams as a national or pro player. Instead of going on to play collegiate soccer, Gina stayed in her community, and turned her intimate knowledge of poverty, gang violence and abuse into a powerful tool to help at-risk youth.

It really peeves me that some of my friends (bless them) can make six figures selling networking apps for disposable smartphones, while Gina struggles to keep financially afloat as she works her butt off to make a real difference in her community. She works fulltime as a probation officer, coaches two boys' teams and two girls' teams, and still takes jobs on the side to make ends meet. What fuels her passion for her work is that she believes in these kids. She knows what they are dealing with at home and on the streets.

During our two months of filming in Watsonville, there were multiple gang-related fatalities within just miles of the stadium where Gina's boys practice. This senseless violence was hard for me to comprehend. Willie, 17, explained in no uncertain terms that he would stab a rival gang member, "Cuz it's me or him. It's kill or be killed. I never know if I’m gonna be alive tomorrow." At his court hearing, Gina encouraged Willie to meet his community service hours by joining the Aztecas team, which he figured "was better than picking up trash." At the first practice, he literally jumped when he saw a rival gang member on the bench next to him. However, by the time he worked toward a championship win, on a team side by side with his rivals, Willie's outlook was completely transformed. Long after his community service hours were met, Willie still shows up for practice early with a smile on his face. He is the first in his family (just as Gina was) to graduate from high school, and he is now applying to college. Willie says, "If Gina hadn’t been in court that day, I honestly don’t know where I would be."

My best hope is that by bringing a positive story from Watsonville to the national stage, we will inspire viewers to believe in boys like Willie, and girls like Gina in the generation to come. As an athlete, a coach, a law enforcement officer, a social worker, and a mother, Gina is truly a HERoic woman -- and it is an honor to be able to share her story with you.