Three Docs About ALS, Women's Football, and Civic Engagement Share an Interesting Throughline

By Seth Freilich | Film | March 17, 2023 |

By Seth Freilich | Film | March 17, 2023 |

At first blush, you’d think there’s no common thread between documentaries about professional women’s football in the 1970s, social clubs and civic engagement, and the political fight to get support for ALS causes. But there very much is. While all three of these documentaries are well made and interesting in their own way, together they tell a compelling and hopeful story for the future of our failing democracy.

The most obviously hopeful of these is No Ordinary Campaign. ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), while relatively rare, is a brutal one with no known cure and an average prognosis of six months. It can be easy to forget this when, aside from Lou Gherig, most of us only think about Stephen Hawking, who lived a unique and impactful 50+ years after his diagnosis. While ALS is the focus of No Ordinary Campaign, it is presented mainly through the lens of Brian Wallach. Before his 2017 diagnosis, Wallach was an assistant DA who had previously touched on politics when working on Obama’s campaign (where he and his wife Sandra met). Following his diagnosis, Wallach pivoted to do what he could to help fight this disease, eventually starting I AM ALS — while there were plenty of organizations out there doing great ALS-related work and support, he found there was no “sustained mover.” After the wildly successful ice bucket challenge in 2014, funding and attention mostly dried up. But as this film documents, Wallach and I AM ALS changed that — in the last few years, they’ve helped get well over $100 million in Federal funding, as well as getting important legislation passed to change some FDA procedures.

A story involving science, medicine, and politics could easily get lost in the weeds, but director Christopher Burke does a good job of doling out just enough information for the viewer to understand what needs to be understood while keeping the focus on the people suffering from and/or trying to provide hope for ALS. It’s a touching and hopeful film that made me tear up a few times because, thanks to the work of Wallach, Sandra, and so many others, it shows the hope that this could be the first generation of ALS patients who live with it chronically rather than eventually succumbing to it.

Meanwhile, I first learned of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League like many, I assume, thanks to Penny Marshall’s wonderful A League of Their Own. I only just now learned of the National Women’s Football Association — formed on the heels of the Women’s Professional Football League — a full-contact women’s league in the ’70s, thanks to the documentary The Herricanes. What a delight! While attendance was abysmal, and the league would collapse before the decade ended, it also hosted the winningest all-time professional football team, the Toledo Troopers. Other teams included the Houston Herricanes (the titular focus of the doc, as filmmaker Olivia Kuan is a daughter of a Herricane) and the more questionably named Oklahoma City Dolls and the, ahem, Tulsa Babes. This tight documentary explores the Herricanes and the league’s rise and fall, as well as spinning off on tangents about Title IX, current women’s involvement in football, etc. It’s the perfect kind of documentary, introducing you to something you likely have never heard of, rooting it in current-day matters, with a host of compelling and interesting talking heads — Jen Welter, the first female coach in the NFL who now runs a women’s football camp, is a particularly inspirational standout.

And then the connection for these two docs unexpectedly came from Join or Die, “a film about why you should join a club … and why the fate of America depends on it.” This doc focuses primarily on Robert Putnam, who has spent his life studying politics through the lens of social capital, famously captured in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Social capital, at is core, is essentially the idea that social and community network has value and the impact of that value on politics and American democracy can be immense. From sibling filmmakers Pete and Rebecca Davis, this is another documentary about a subject, political science, where it is easy to get lost in the weeds. While the talking heads run the gamut from politicians to scientists to community organizers, among others, the Davises deftly provide enough story to let us understand the topic without getting lost in it (and, like a great documentary, left me wanting to read and learn more!). There’s too much covered by the film to get into here, but the crux of Putnam’s lifelong work is that there is a lot of evidence that the decline of social capital and the civic engagement that often comes from that, has fed into the growing political divide that is crippling our country right now.

And that’s the thread that pulls these three films together. In No Ordinary Campaign, we follow folks who have come together specifically for civic and political engagement, seeking to extend and/or save their own lives, and we see what success their strong motivation and bond can yield. Meanwhile, The Herricanes mostly shows women joining together simply to do something they love. Yet, from that, we also see the cultural and political change that results from that social bond. So in their own way, both of these support the final thesis of Join or Die, that “to tackle today’s challenges, we need millions of Americans to become joiners.” While it’s certainly not that simple — and the cynic in me is not so sure that our national disconnect is repairable by any means — these three docs do package together to create a glimmer of hope for the future.

No Ordinary Campaign, The Herricanes, and Join or Die all screened at the 2023 SXSW Film & TV Festival.